ABSTRACT
In recent years, a number of analyses have examined the way in which graphic representations are incorporated into scientific and technological discourse, particularly with reference to the workplace (e.g., Ford, 1999; Goodwin, 1994, 1996; Goodwin and Goodwin, 1996; Heath and Luff, 1996; Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000a, 2000b; Hutchins and Palen, 1997; Ochs et al., 1994; Ochs, Jacoby et al., 1996; Suchman, 1997). The key focus of such research is to analyse talk and action conjointly, focussing on the way in which complex tasks that are generally taken for granted and often go unnoticed by participants within the interaction, can be analysed in moment-by-moment detail. Emphasis may be, for example, on the way in which tasks are collaboratively constructed in the high school physics laboratory (Ford, 1999); on the way in which human interaction, tools, perception, and the details of language use mutually shape each other in the operations room at an airport (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1996); on the way in which the interactional employment of grammar and gesture can diffuse the boundaries between the scientist as subject and the constructed physical world as object (Ochs et al., 1994); on the way in which colleagues within a telecommunications control room can establish mutual orientation towards documents or computer screens (Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000a); or on the way in which professionals, such as archaeologists or lawyers, organise the production and organisation of graphic representations as ‘professional vision’, through which events are seen and understood in socially organised ways (Goodwin, 1994).
