Andrew Wood
A********
Project 6a
INTRODUCTION
In this short movie, two Mandeville Theater crewmembers (Jamie and Karl - the names have been changed) are cooperating to set up the soundboard for a show when Jamie detects a problem. Before the video begins, Karl had just plugged in a microphone receiver into the soundboard. Now they are getting a signal from a microphone that hasn’t been turned on yet. This is represented by a light on the soundboard that glows green as soon as the receiver is plugged in. Later they determine that the receiver connector is broken. This portion of the video shows them realizing that a problem exists and then trying to determine its source.
I am going to describe and analyze a 30 second clip from the middle of this video. I will be focusing on the ways in which the expert worker (Jamie) uses speech, gestures, and body orientation to communicate to her novice coworker (Karl) in this situation. I have provided a transcript of the events both at the end of my paper and as relevant sections get introduced. I have also included several still frames of the action at the end of my paper, and I have also posted the trimmed video clip in Quicktime format and AVI format.
There are a lot of interactions going on in even this short clip, so in particular I will be pointing out how Jamie attracts Karl’s attention and focuses it on specific elements of their shared environment. She uses speech, gestures, and body orientation to convey an incredible amount of information. Several of these actions are repeated, which leads me to believe that they were intentional and that she didn’t accidentally convey information. During my discussion of these observations, I will also show how both workers use discursive practices to make sense of their environment.
Before you read the following description you should understand some basics of sound. The soundboard is the control center for all the sound equipment. It has a bunch of inputs coming from microphones and their receivers, and there are output connectors for speakers, monitors, and more. There are no wires from the microphones to the receivers. The microphones transmit signals on different frequencies and thus have to be set to different channels so that the receiver can pick up their signals. The coding system consists of a series of numbers that are used to distinguish between microphone-receiver pairs (Goodwin, 1994). Once they have been encoded the workers can simply refer to them by number.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:00 – 00:03 |
J: Whoa:: what’s on? |
J leans in over soundboard, pauses for (0.8). The shadow cast by her head allows her to see that the light is on. K is coiling a power cord. |
Presses ‘solo’ button on soundboard to isolate the microphone signal |
Jaimie’s speech here shows that she has already started to diagnose the problem. She uses the word “Whoa” here to indicate that something unexpected has just happened. It also is an invitation for Karl to ask a question to understand to what she is referring. She says, “what’s on?” with a rising intonation to indicate a question. She knows that the green light means that a signal is coming into the receiver, but doesn’t know “what’s on” or where the signal is coming from. By leaning over the soundboard, Jamie accomplishes two things: she is able to block the overhead light to see if the green signal light is really on, or if it’s a reflection from the bright overhead lights, and she is indirectly showing to Karl the phenomenon that confuses her. Karl is busy coiling the power cord and doesn’t notice her body movements, and so he doesn’t pick up on the problem until much later.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:04 – 00:07 |
|
Turns body and moves sideways to pick up microphones on table. |
Picks up microphones, turns them over in her hands, and examines them to see if they are turned on already. |
Since Karl doesn’t acknowledge that he understood Jamie, she goes ahead and checks for simple obvious errors in setup. She uses expert knowledge, namely that if the microphone is turned on this would explain the presence of a signal.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:07 – 00:09 |
J: That’s weird. |
K puts down coiled cord. J speaks and leans back over to check if light is still on. |
|
|
00:11 |
K: hmm. |
|
J’s hand is moving the volume slider. |
Jaimie’s word choice here is similar in meaning to her first statement. It again serves to alert Karl that something strange is happening. She also leans back over the soundboard, repeating her body positioning (see ). The problem wasn’t that the microphones were turned on, so she wants to know if he knows something she doesn’t. This time she gets the acknowledgement she was expecting earlier. Karl says “hmm” to acknowledge that Jamie found something. He can see her hand on the soundboard and her torso hovering over the board, and from the shared goal of setting up sound he can infer that the problem is with the sound. From this we can see that by presenting herself as looking closely at something, rather than by simply looking, she allows Karl to embed her actions into the environment and make this connection (Heath and Hindmarsh, 2000, p.96).
Her statement and body orientation also serve to build up a precharacterization of the phenomenon for Karl.
The precharacterization
projects what the object may consist of, where within the local environment it
may be found, and how it should be responded to or dealt with (Heath and
Hindmarsh, 2000, p. 92).
She sets up that it is unexpected, has to do with the soundboard, and needs to be fixed, and by doing so presents the situation to Karl so that he can begin to understand it.
Additionally, his mumble is taken to mean that he is asking for further clarification. Now that she knows that she has his attention, she can explain the situation more clearly.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:14 |
J: I’m getting a signal=Which one did you just plug into six? |
J turns toward receiver and turns her head to look at it. |
J is turning up the channel to see what kind of signal she’s getting. |
Part of an expert/novice worker schema is demonstrated here. A schema is a representation that “leaves unspecified a number of ‘slots’ which can be filled in by context or by additional information from the speaker” (D’Andrade, 1995, p. 123). It is assumed that the expert passes knowledge to the novice, and here the expert, Jamie, is trying to show Karl, the novice, that a green light represents an incoming signal. She is expecting him to connect this fact to her later statement, “See how that green light’s on?” This reveals two things: the light is a graphical representation of a signal (Goodwin, 1994), and that the novice is expected to try to learn from the expert. The expert shows and tells the novice what to look for and how to go about looking for it. She also waits until Karl says, “Ya,” before removing her hands. This shows that the novice should give feedback to the expert to let her know that he understands what he is being told. Another important element of this schema is that the expert is allowed to play with settings without asking for permission. Jamie picks up the microphones to see if they’re on, and she also turns up the volume on the channel. In these cases she doesn’t try to explain what she’s doing to Karl, which goes against the expert teaching the novice element, but they do show the permissible bounds granted to the expert. The novice is allowed to plug in one of the receivers to channel six, but the expert questions the success of his actions. Thus the novice is not expected to perform tasks correctly.
The gestures in the following short segments occur rapidly and are rich in meaning. They show how body orientation and gesture are used to enhance the speech and how they are imperative in demonstrating the representation of the problem.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:26 |
J: See how |
J leans forward and right, with K moving to her left. |
J points at green light |
Here Karl is moving around behind Jamie. She realizes this and moves out of his expected line of sight to render the green light visible to him. The act of pointing precedes the words by a fraction of a second. It serves to bring Karl’s focus to the pertinent area of the soundboard. At this point, he doesn’t know how Jamie could tell that there was something wrong with the sound setup. The choice of the command verb “see” further shows that she wants him to look at the soundboard and realize what parts of the representation mean, such as this little green light. The act of pointing enforces this and calls his visual attention to the specified spot.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:27 |
J: that green light’s on? K: =What? |
|
J cups her hand, shades over the light. |
Here the speech and gesture complement each other perfectly. As Jamie says, “green light’s on?” she cups her hand to create a shadow over the section of the soundboard with the light (see ). By drawing on her past experience of trying to see the glowing light against the sharp overhead lights, she knows how to present this data to Karl. This is an example of highlighting, “which makes specific phenomena in a complex perceptual field salient by marking them in some fashion” (Goodwin, 1994, p.33). The shadow makes the light easier to see. But there are many lights, buttons, and sliders on the soundboard, making it a complex object. Jamie employs the discursive practice of highlighting in order to emphasize the domain of scrutiny (p.33). The position of Jaimie’s hand and shadow marks where on the soundboard Karl should look for the light and divides the soundboard into relevant and non-relevant sections.
Time |
Speech |
Body Orientation |
Gesture |
|
00:28 |
K: [Ya J: [See how this green light’s on? |
J turns her left shoulder away so K can see better. Points back at green light. |
About (0.5) after “Ya”, J removes both hands. |
Jamie starts to repeat herself just as Karl acknowledges that he understood her before. Then she moves even more out of the way, providing an even better angle for him to see. She repeats the pointing and cupping gestures with both hands simultaneously because she assumes Karl didn’t catch them the first time. Since these actions were repeated, this proves that they weren’t meaningless or trivial motions through space; they had clear meanings behind them that couldn’t have been conveyed efficiently by words alone.
From this study of interactions between people in a workplace setting I have seen that non-verbal actions are just loaded with significance. They have intended meanings that enhance dialogue, highlight sections of a complex environment, and help communicate areas of focus. Discursive practices also help the workers make sense of their environment. Speech, body orientation, and gesture are all combined so efficiently and effortlessly in everyday tasks that it is impossible to isolate one by itself and assign meaning to it without considering the impact of the others.
D’Andrade, R. The Growth of Schema Theory. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, 1995.
Goodwin, C. Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, Sept 1994.
Heath, C. and Hindmarsh, J. Configuring Action in Objects: From Mutual Space to Media Space. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2000.