JournalTOCs

Social Interaction : Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality
Number of Followers: 1

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2446-3620
Published by U of Copenhagen

[10 journals]

Situated Agency in Digitally Artifacted Social Interactions
- Authors: Samira Ibnelkaïd, Iuliia Avgustis
  Abstract: This special issue brings together video-based studies on the local accomplishment of human and non-human agency in digitally artifacted social interactions. It seeks to overcome the dual ontological approach to agency by observing its situated, multimodal, and dynamic enactment by interactants. This gathered body of research explores the notion of situated agency through various lenses. Contributions to this issue can be split into four groups: human-chatbot interactions (smart speakers and service telephone chatbots), human-robot interactions (social robots and robots in educational settings), interactions with digital technologies in specific contexts (autonomous cars and pedestrians, virtual reality and atypical users), and face-to-face human interactions involving the use of digital devices in mundane settings.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.136855
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Human and Non-Human Agency as Practical Accomplishment
- Authors: Stephan Habscheid, Tim Hector, Christine Hrncal
  Abstract: The article takes its starting point with heuristics, according to which agency is not to be seen as something that certain ontological entities stably do or do not possess. Rather, it is assumed that agency, especially in voice-based exchange with smart speaker technology, is a dynamic accomplishment, basically bound to the local (linguistic) practices carried out by or rather involving contributions by participants with unequal resources for participating. Following Hirschauer (2016), we distinguish between levels of activity both on an active-passive spectrum as well as on a proactive-inhibitive spectrum and reconstruct empirically against that background how in particular the smart speaker can appear in different situations and contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of the notion of agency relating the observed practices on the one hand and against the background of a broader context of agency as media theory has it on the other, including domestication theory as well as recent smart home technologies and platform logics.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137378
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
How Conversational are “Conversational Agents”'
- Authors: Andrei Korbut
  Abstract: The paper considers whether is it possible to view interactions with so-called conversational agents (chatbots, voice assistants, etc.) as a form of conversation. It is argued here that such conversational agents are conversational in a proper sense. To justify this conclusion, the analysis of the beginnings of 100 calls to a Russian municipal call center, processed by a chatbot, is conducted. The revealed features of the inquiry formulations, silences, and overlaps at the beginning of the calls show that users deal with the chatbot as a conversational partner and not as a voice user interface. It is proposed that to call an interaction a “conversation,” it is enough that at least one co-participant (the weak participation requirement) is able to understand all the turns in the interaction (the strong analyzability requirement) as part of the ongoing conversation.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137249
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Managing Turn-Taking in Human-Robot Interactions
- Authors: Ali Reza Majlesi, Ronald Cumbal, Olov Engwall, Sarah Gillet, Silvia Kunitz, Gustav Lymer, Catrin Norrby, Sylvaine Tuncer
  Abstract: This study deals with turn-taking in human-robot interactions (HRI). Based on 15 sessions of video-recorded interactions between pairs of human participants and a social robot called Furhat, we explore how human participants orient to violations of the normative order of turn-taking in social interaction and how they handle those violations. As a case in point, we present sequences of HRI to show particular features of turn-taking with the robot and also how the robot may fail to respond to the human participants’ bid to take a turn. In these sequences, the participants either complete the turn in progress and ignore the overlap caused by the robot’s continuation of its turn, or they cut short their own turn and restart in the next possible turn-transition place. In all cases in our data, the overlaps and failed smooth turn-transitions are oriented to as accountable and in some sense interactionally problematic. The results of the study point not only to improvables in robot engineering, but also to routine practices of projection and the ways in which human subjects orient toward normative expectations of ordinary social interactions, even when conversing with a robot.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137380
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Provoking Situations'
- Authors: Philippe Sormani, Audrey Hostettler
  Abstract: This paper presents a practice-based video analysis of student-robot interaction in situ. In so doing, the paper explicates the double interest of provoking situations, both as a praxeological topic and pedagogical resource. Designed and developed as a hybrid study of instructional work, the paper combines video analysis and the practical reenactment of two contrasting episodes of student-robot interaction. This combined approach pursues two related aims. First, the paper explicates (some of) the “tutorial problems” (Garfinkel, 2002, chapter 4) resulting from the practical reenactment, problems that recast and complement the video analysis. In particular, the focal theme of situated agency in student-robot interaction will be revisited as an intricate phenomenon and pedagogical issue. Second, the paper offers a reflexive intervention in ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EM/CA), insofar as it prospects a (relatively) new avenue for EM/CA research, both from within and contributing to its productive tensions. That is, the paper articulates the video reenactment of situated interaction as a heuristic strategy, while leveraging the (arguably) phenomenological difference between EM and CA on education as a methodological resource. The paper concludes with how and why the provocative impetus of science and technology studies (Woolgar, 2004) can, and perhaps should, be leveraged for prospective EM/CA studies more broadly, be it on their historically alluring home turf, Los Angeles, or anywhere else.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137381
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Stopping Aside
- Authors: Jakub Mlynář, Grace Eden, Florian Evéquoz
  Abstract: Contributing to interactionist studies of walking and to research on human-machine interaction, this article draws on video recordings of a self-driving shuttle being tested as a means of public transportation. The analytical focus is on yielding as achieved through the practice of pedestrians’ stepping aside, stopping, and letting the shuttle pass. The paper examines and describes how solitary pedestrians “stop aside” as well as how mobile formations of multiple persons take part in the practice. Finally, it discusses stopping aside as a social action that is often followed by displays of gratitude and reflects on this facet with regard to automated vehicles. In the context of this special issue, the central claim advanced is that agency reflexively emerges from the organized and sequential character of the situation and is grounded in assemblages of human and technological aspects, rather than originating in clearly distinguishable singular actors or agents.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137114
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Halting the Decay of Talk
- Authors: Nils Oliver Klowait, Maria Erofeeva
  Abstract: We investigate how people with atypical bodily capabilities interact within virtual reality (VR) and the way they overcome interactional challenges in these emerging social environments. Based on a videographic multimodal single case analysis, we demonstrate how non-speaking VR participants furnish their bodies, at-hand instruments, and their interactive environment for their practical purposes. Our findings are subsequently related to renewed discussions of the relationship between agency and environment, and the co-constructed nature of situated action. We thus aim to contribute to the growing vocabulary of atypical interaction analysis and the broader context of ethnomethodological conceptualizations of unorthodox and fractured interactional ecologies.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.136903
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Reporting Mobile Device-Mediated Text to Manage Action and Agency in
Co-Present Conversation
- Authors: Jessica S. Robles, Stephen M. DiDomenico, Joshua Raclaw, Jack B. Joyce
  Abstract: The paper considers the role of agency in human interaction with mobile devices. We use multimodal conversation analysis to trace how mobile screen content is reproduced as locally relevant for updating information for co-present interlocutors. While informing-centered actions supported by mobile devices may sometimes have the character of an agentic intrusion into the local interaction, we show that the organization of device-accessed information and its meaningfulness is nonetheless positioned in relation to how device-supported updates are animated into social action by human participants. This research contributes to understanding how device-related content is sequentially incorporated into face-to-face interaction.
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137382
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)
Assemmethodology'
- Authors: Brian Lystgaard Due
  Abstract: NA
  PubDate: 2023-06-12
  DOI: 10.7146/si.v6i1.137001
  Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 1 (2023)