Working with contemporaneously produced text & talk: A hybrid problematising workshop
Friday May 22nd, Brockington, B008, Loughborough University & Online
This event is supported by the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (CRCC).
This event is now at capacity.
What is this problematising workshop about?
Many EMCA scholars have long been concerned with how to collect, analyse and present data from interactions that involve both real-time spoken conversation and contemporaneously produced textual accounts. This issue is not only methodological but is a live concern for participants across a range of interactional contexts. For example, emergency call handlers must categorise callers’ descriptions in ways that determine whether and how help is dispatched, therapists and clinicians selectively reformulate information provided by patients to convey its medical relevancy in documentation, and clients and patients orient to what is already known via their on‑screen medical notes and may avoid repeating information. Participants across institutional conversations must routinely navigate the contradictory pressures of maintaining intersubjectivity whilst engaging with computer mediated prompts and frameworks that govern the order in which information can be entered into records.
What might be relevant settings for discussion?
- Interactions with virtual assistants (such as Alexa) and the logs produced
- Therapeutic and clinical interactions with screens, medical records
- Criminal justice e.g. incident logs, suspect interview statements, transcripts in trials
- Social media e.g. livestreaming where there’s live interaction and synchronous posting
- News/entertainment media with asynchronous “below line” commenting
- Journalistic interviews drawing on “evidence” at hand during the interview
- Face-to-face interaction in which there’s also simultaneous texting/online engagement on mobile devices
- Summaries being produced by AI in a range of settings such as in Education
What kind of questions might we ask?
We are proposing a problematising workshop where interested colleagues come together to pose and discuss questions organised by the practical-live challenges for interacting parties and more methodological analytical challenges for researchers. Questions such as:
- How are textual records integrated into real-time interaction and vice versa?
- How does managing these materials shape the context of the situation?
- What is the persuasive or action-oriented power of these accompanying mediated materials to live/in-person interaction?
- What practical ways can we incorporate these multimodalities/multiactivity into data representation/presentation (e.g. transcription) and include them in presentations, papers in a coherent way?
- Are there concepts/theories in media theory/mediation/etc that helps us understand these relationships? (e.g. entextualisation, intertextuality)
- What does the future hold in terms of, for example, AI-generated content that must be dealt with on-the-spot in interactions, and how do audiences negotiate these streams of data?
What will the format be?
We invite colleagues to talk directly to some of the issues above in the hybrid morning session. Then, in the afternoon, in-person (due to ethical restrictions) we will work hands-on with some high-stakes data provided by Sarah Atkins (Aston University) in which callers are reporting possible kidnap to police call handlers, who are populating an incident log, from which categorisations and priority decision making is taking place. The abstract for this in-person session is below.
Schedule
10:00 – 11:00am – Talk and text in clinical encounters
The relationship between text and talk is highly consequential in clinical settings. Patient records (now readily accessible to patients) are produced, updated and consulted in real time during consultations. Clinicians must often navigate IT systems and pop-up prompts that shape what gets asked, all while sustaining a spoken encounter with a patient. AI scribes have added a further layer of complexity – a non-human participant generating a textual account of the interaction as it unfolds and shaping how participants orient to what is ‘on the record’. This session brings together colleagues working in and around clinical settings to discuss the practical and analytic challenges that arise when talk and text are produced together.
11:00 – 12:00 – Talk and text in other institutional settings
Institutional encounters routinely involve the live production, refashioning, and consultation of written records alongside spoken interaction. In settings such as mediation, legal hearings, interviews, and courtroom proceedings, talk is frequently shaped by texts that are drafted, revised, read aloud, corrected, ratified, or contested in real time. These records may carry immediate legal, procedural, or moral force, while also serving as enduring artefacts that circulate far beyond the interaction in which they were produced. Participants must therefore manage multiple orientations at once: to the unfolding spoken exchange, to texts that are visible or invoked within the interaction, and to anticipated audiences who will later encounter those texts in transformed or decontextualised form (e.g. judges, lawyers, institutions, clients, or the public). Technologies ranging from shared screens and templates to transcripts, official logs, and automated or AI-assisted documentation further shape what can be said, how it is recorded, and how disputes or accounts are resolved.
The second session brings together colleagues working across a range of non-clinical institutional settings (e.g., mediation, courts) to explore the practical and analytic challenges that arise when talk and text are produced together under conditions of accountability, consequence, and asymmetrical power.
12:00 -13:00 – Lunch
13:00 – 14: 00 – Methodological challenges and approaches
Many EMCA scholars have grappled with how to collect, analyse and present data from interactions that involve both real-time spoken conversation and contemporaneously produced texts. Building on the morning sessions, this session turns to consider the practical ways in which we can incorporate these multimodalities/multiactivity into our data representation (e.g. transcription, reconstruction of text production) and how we might analyse and include such data in presentations, papers etc in a coherent way. This includes considering how we might attend to shifting participation frameworks that arise when texts are produced alongside talk and how we as analysts have privelleged access to those. Looking ahead, we consider what challenges AI-generated content, produced during and after interactions, poses for EMCA scholarship and how we work with and make sense of it.
14:00 – 14:15 – Break
14:15 – 15: 45 – Talk/Text in 999 kidnap call data [in-person data session]
This in-person data session features an extract from a collection of UK police emergency calls which, at some point during their progression through the police control room, were categorised as possible kidnappings. These high-stakes incidents unfold across dual communicative tracks: (1) the spoken interaction between caller and call-handler, and (2) the simultaneous written text of the Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) log. The CAD log, initially typed by the call-handler but open to real-time contributions from dispatchers and other officers, becomes a crucial institutional text, shaping the ongoing interaction with the caller, the immediate police response and the longer-term record of the incident.
The extract selected for discussion focuses on how ‘vulnerability’ is constructed, negotiated, and entered into the CAD log, as well as how this is responded to during the unfolding incident (an actionable category in the log that later triggers safeguarding procedures).
The data therefore provide insights into the intersection of talk and text in emergency calls- a phenomenon we represent through a dual-track transcript. Because time is central in these incidents, where police response targets are measured in minutes, our transcripts also time-stamp both the spoken and written streams from the call’s opening moment to capture their progression and overlap.
The session will focus on the representational and analytic challenges these talk-text interactions pose for conversation analysis and related approaches. We ask: How can transcription best capture the simultaneity of spoken and written institutional activity? What gets turned/transformed into text from the caller’s account? How are categories and representation of an incident produced, ratified, and circulated through the institution? How might we best account for the multiple, partly invisible backstage participants that shape the ways the interaction unfolds?
To attend please email: e.richardson@lboro.ac.uk on behalf of Sarah Atkins (Aston University), Alexandra Kent (Keele University) & DARG.