Expert answer:explain two concepts and describe a practice of it
Expert answer:QuestionIn this class, we’ve been practicing the skills of observing situated practices in the realworld and analyzing them. For this assignment, we ask you to analyze the situated practices of our lecture classroom.Here are two concepts● highlighting (Goodwin),● coding (Goodwin),For each concept:● read the article I have attached, explain the concept in your own words.● describe a practice that happened in our class that exemplifies this concept.CodingYou will receive grades in three areas: assignments, participation, and exams. When we grade assignments we will confer a check-plus, a check, a check-minus, or a zero. A check- plus indicates that we feel you have developed a solid understanding of the material. In letter grades, a check-plus equates to an “A.” A check indicates that we feel you have a passing, but not masterful, understanding of the material. In letter grades a check equates to a “B.” A check-minus indicates you have demonstrated a beginning understanding, but have a long way to go. In letter grades, a check-minus equates to a “C.” Finally, a zero indicates that you did not do the assignment or that you appear to have made minimal effort. Students will receive high marks for their participation grades if they attend sections regularly, contribute to discussion, and demonstrate to their TAs that they are grappling with the material. Students that miss two sections will automatically receive a zero for their participation grade.HighlightingThe slides the professor used in the class can be seen as an example to describe highlighting concept. In the slides, for example, the professor may choose to highlight some important information using a different color, or to write them down in a separate slide.Make sure to include richly detailed descriptions that show the reader how the practice you are describing is actually an example of the concept.Do remember to quote some sentences from the reading I have attached.Please write 4 pages. Using simple grammar and words.
week_7b_goodwin_1994.pdf
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Professional Vision
Author(s): Charles Goodwin
Reviewed work(s):
Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 606-633
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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GOODWIN
CHARLES
Universityof South Carolina
Professional Vision
DISCURSIVE PRACTICES are used by members of a profession to shape events in the
domains subject to their professional scrutiny. The shaping process creates the
objects of knowledge that become the insignia of a profession’s craft: the theories,
artifacts, and bodies of expertise that distinguish it from other professions. Analysis of
the methods used by members of a community to build and contest the events that
structure their lifeworld contributes to the development of a practice-based theory of
knowledge and action.~ In this article, I examine two contexts of professional activity:
archaeological field excavation and legal argumentation. In each of these contexts, I
investigate three practices: (1) coding, which transforms phenomena observed in a
specific setting into the objects of knowledge that animate the discourse of a profession;
(2) highlighting,which makes specific phenomena in a complex perceptual field salient
by marking them in some fashion; and (3) producing and articulating materialrepresentations.By applying such practices to phenomena in the domain of scrutiny, participants build and contest professionalvision, which consists of socially organized ways of
seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a
particular social group.
In the 1992 trial of four white police officers charged with beating Mr. Rodney King,
an African-American motorist who had been stopped for speeding, a videotape of the
beating (made without the knowledge of the officers by a man in an apartment across
the street) became a politically charged theater for contested vision. Opposing sides in
the case used the murky pixels of the same television image to display to the jury
incommensurate events: a brutal, savage beating of a man lying helpless on the ground
versus careful police response to a dangerous “PCP-crazedgiant” who was argued to be
in control of the situation. By deploying an array of systematic discursive practices,
including talk, ethnography, category systems articulated by expert witnesses, and
various ways of highlighting images provided by the videotape, lawyers for both sides
were able to structure, in ways that suited their own distinctive agendas, the complex
perceptual field visible on the TV screen.
The Rodney King trial provides a vivid example of how the ability to see a meaningful
event is not a transparent, psychological process but instead a socially situated activity
accomplished through the deployment of a range of historically constituted discursive
practices. It would, however, be quite wrong to treat the selective vision that is so salient
in the King trial as a special, deviant case, merely a set of lawyers’ tricks designed to
distort what would otherwise be a clear, neutral vision of objective events unambiguously
visible on the tape. All vision is perspectival and lodged within endogenous communities
of practice. An archaeologist and a farmer see quite different phenomena in the same
patch of dirt (for example, soil that will support particular kinds of crops versus stains,
features, and artifacts that provide evidence for earlier human activity at this spot). An
event being seen, a relevant objectof knowledge,emerges through the interplay between
a domain of scrutiny(a patch of dirt, the images made available by the King videotape,
etc.) and a set of discursivepractices(dividing the domain of scrutiny by highlighting a
figure against a ground, applying specific coding schemes for the constitution and
interpretation of relevant events, etc.) being deployed within a specificactivity(arguing
a legal case, mapping a site, planting crops, etc.). The object being investigated is thus
AmericanAnthoplogist96(3):606-633. Copyright? 1994, American AnthropologicalAssociation.No reproduction
of Figures 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 may be made, for any reason, without prior written permission from George Holliday.
606
Goodwin]
VISION
PROFESSIONAL
607
analogous to what Wittgenstein (1958:7) called a languagegame, a “whole, consisting of
language and the actions into which it is woven.”
MyOwn Practices for Seeing
Itis not possible to work in some abstract world where the constitution of knowledge
through a politics of representation has been magically overcome. The analysis in this
article makes extensive use of the very same practices it is studying. Graphic representations, including transcripts of talk, diagrams, and frame grabs of scenes recorded
on videotape, are annotated and highlighted in order to make salient specific events
within them. Such highlighting guides the reader to see within a complex perceptual
field just those events that I find relevant to the points I am developing. Applying a
or codingschemeto diverse practices in
categorysuch as highlighting,graphicrepresentation,
different environments is itself an example of how coding schemes are used to organize
disparate events into a common analytical framework. It is thus relevant to note briefly
whyI made the representational choices that I did.
To analyze how practice is organized as a temporally unfolding process encompassing
both human interaction and situated tool use, I require as data records that preserve
not only sequences of talk but also body movements of the participants and the
phenomena to which they are attending as they use relevant representations. I use
videotapes as my primary source of data, recognizing that, like transcription, any camera
position constitutes a theory about what is relevant within a scene-one that will have
enormous consequences for what can be seen in it later-and what forms of subsequent
analysis are possible. A tremendous advantage of recorded data is that they permit
repeated, detailed examination of actual sequences of talk and embodied work practices
in the settings where practitioners actually perform these activities. Moreover, others
can look at-and possibly challenge-my understanding of the events being examined.
As part of continuing fieldwork focusing ethnographically on how scientists actually
do their work, activities at one archaeological field school in Argentina and two in the
United States were videotaped. All the material analyzed in this article is drawn from
one of the American field schools. Tapes of the first Rodney King trial were made from
broadcasts of Court TV. I was unable to record the entire trial, so my own recordings
were supplemented by an edited summary of the trial purchased from Court TV. The
second trial was not broadcast on either radio or television. I was able to get into the
courtroom only for the prosecution’s closing arguments.
Practices of transcription constitute one local site within anthropology where the
politics of representation emerge as a practical problem.2 For a journal article, the rich
record of complicated vocal and visual events moving through time provided by a
videotape must be transformed into something that can silently inhabit the printed
page.
Both linguistic anthropologists and conversation analysts have devoted considerable
complementary and overlapping attention to questions of how talk should be transcribed, including the issue of how speakers themselves parse the stream of speech into
relevant units. A major analytic focus of conversation analysis is the description of the
procedures used by participants in the midst of talk-in-interaction to construct the events
that constitute the lived lifeworld within ongoing processes of action.3 This has required
developing methods of transcription that permit detailed analysis of actors’ changing
orientations as events unfold though time. Linguistic anthropologists, concerned with
maintaining the complex structure of oral performance, have argued that the division
of talk into lines within a transcript should make visible to the reader how the speaker
organized his or her talk into relevant units.4 I have tried to do that in this article,
breaking lines at intonational units and indenting the continuation of units too long to
fit within the page margins. Given the rich interplay of different kinds of units in the
stream of speech, the divisions I’ve made should not be treated as anything more than
608
AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST
[96, 1994
a provisional attempt to deal with a very complicated issue. In all other respects, my
transcription uses the system developed by GailJefferson5 for the analysis of conversation. The conventions most relevant to the analysis in this article include the use of bold
italicsto indicate talk spoken with special emphasis, a left bracket ([) to mark the onset
of overlapping talk, and numbers in parentheses-for example, (1.2)-to note the
length of silences in seconds and tenths of seconds. A dash marks the cut-off of the
current sound. An equal sign indicates “latching,” signifying that there is no interval
between the end of one unit and the beginning of a next. Transcribers’ comments are
italicized in double parentheses; single parentheses around talk indicate a problematic
hearing. Punctuation symbols are used to mark intonation changes rather than as
grammatical symbols: a period indicates a falling contour; a question mark, a rising
contour; and a comma, a falling-rising contour, as might be found in the midst of a list.
Coding Schemes
Central to the organization of human cognition are processes of classification. Coding
schemesare one systematic practice used to transform the world into the categories and
events that are relevant to the work of the profession (Cicourel 1964, 1968). For
example, linguists classify sounds in terms of phonetic distinctions; sociologists classify
people according to sex and class.
The pervasive power of coding schemes to organize apprehension of the world is
demonstrated in particularly vivid fashion in scientific work. Ethnographic analysis of
what is usually considered the epitome of abstract, objective, universal, disembodied
cognition-Western science-has revealed it to be a patchwork of situated, disparate,
locally organized cultures in which knowledge is constituted through a variety of social
and political processes.6 Central to the cognitive processes that constitute science are
both material objects (tools and machines of many different types) and writing practices
quite unlike those typically studied by anthropologists investigating literacy. In order to
generate a data set, collections of observations that can be compared with each other,
scientists use coding schemes to circumscribe and delineate the world they examine.
When disparate events are viewed through a single coding scheme, equivalent observations become possible.
Let us briefly investigate this process using the example of a field school for young
archaeologists. The medium in which archaeologists work is dirt. Students are given a
form that contains an elaborate set of categories for describing the color, consistency,
and texture of whatever dirt they encounter. They are even expected to taste a sample
of the dirt to determine how sandy it is. Moreover, some of the categories are supported
by additional tools of inscription, such as a Munsell color chart, used by archaeologists
all over the world as a standard for color descriptions.
The process of filling in the form requires physical, cognitive, and perceptual work.
Thus, in order to determine the color of a specimen of dirt, the students must obtain a
sample with a trowel, highlight it by squirting it with water, and then hold the sample
under the holes in the Munsell color chart (see Figure 1). The Munsell book encapsulates in a material object the theory and solutions developed by earlier workers faced
with this task of classification (Hutchins 1993). The pages juxtapose color patches and
viewing holes that allow the dirt to be seen night next to the color sample, providing a
historically constituted architecture for perception.
Though apparently distant from the abstractworld of archaeological theory and from
the debates that are currently animating the discipline, this encounter between a coding
scheme and the world is a key locus for scientific practice, the place where the
multifaceted complexity of “nature”is transformed into the phenomenal categories that
make up the work environment of a scientific discipline. It is precisely here that nature
is transformed into culture.
Goodwin ]
PROFESSIONAL VISION
609
Figure 1
Munsell color chart.
Despite the rigorous way in which a tool such as this one structures perception of the
dirt being scrutinized, finding the correct category is not an automatic or even an easy
task (Goodwin 1993). The very way in which the Munsell chart provides a context-free
reference standard creates problems of its own. The color patches on the chart are
glossy, while the dirt never is, so that the chart color and the sample color never look
exactly the same. Moreover, the colors being evaluated frequently fall between the
discrete categories provided by the Munsell chart. Two students at the field school
looking at exactly the same dirt and reference colors can and do disagree as to how it
should be classified. However, the definitiveness provided by a coding scheme typically
erases from subsequent documentation the cognitive and perceptual uncertainties that
these students are grappling with, as well as the work practices within which they are
embedded.
The use of such coding schemes to organize the perception of nature, events, or
people within the discourse of a profession carries with it an array of perceptual and
cognitive operations that have far-reaching impact. First, by using such a system, a
worker views the world from the perspective it establishes. Of all the possible ways that
the earth could be looked at, the perceptual work of students using this form is focused
on determining the exact color of a minute sample of dirt. They engage in active
cognitive work, but the parameters of that work have been established by the system that
is organizing their perception. Insofar as the coding scheme establishes an orientation
toward the world, it constitutes a structure of intentionality whose proper locus is not
an isolated, Cartesian mind but a much larger organizational system, one that is
characteristically mediated through mundane bureaucratic documents such as forms.
Forms, with their coding schemes, allow a senior investigator to inscribe his or her
perceptual distinctions into the work practices of the technicians who code the data.
Such systems provide an example of how distributed cognition is organized through the
writing practices that coordinate action within an organization (Smith 1990:121-122).
Highlighting
Human cognitive activity characteristically occurs in environments that provide a
complicated perceptual field. A quite general class of cognitive practices consists of
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AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
[96, 1994
methods used to divide a domain of scrutiny into a figure and a ground, so that events
relevant to the activity of the moment stand out. For example, forms and other
documents packed with different kinds of information are a major textual component
of many work environments. Faced with such a dense perceptual field, workers in many
settings highlighttheir documents with colored markers, handwritten annotations, and
stick-on notes. In so doing they tailor the document so that those parts of it which
contain information relevant to their own work are made salient. Psychologists have
long talked about figure/ground relations as a basic element of human perception.
Situating such processes not only within the mind but as visible operations on external
phenomena has a range of significant consequences. As we will see in subsequent
examples, through these practices structures of relevance in the material environment
can be made prominent, thus becoming ways of shaping not only one’s own perception
but also that of others.
Highlighting will be examined first in the work practices of archaeologists. In looking
at the earth, archaeologists attend to an array of color distinctions in order to discern
the traces of past human structures. For example, even though a post that supported a
roof of an ancient house has long since decayed, the earth where it stood will have subtle
color differences from the dirt around it. Archaeologists attempt to locate features such
as these post molds7 by scrutinizing the earth as they dig. Categories of relevance to the
profession, such as post molds, are thus used to structure interpretation of the landscape. When a possible feature is found, the archaeological category and the traces in
the dirt that possibly instantiate it are each used to elaborate the other in what has been
8 Thus the category “post mold” provides
called the documentary
methodof interpretation.
a texture of intelligibility that unifies disparate patches of color into a coherent object.
These patches of color in turn provide evidence for the existence in this patch of dirt
of an instance of the object proposed by the category.
Features can be difficult to see. In order to make them visible to others, the
archaeologist outlines them by drawing a line in the dirt with a trowel (see Figure 2).
By doing this the archaeologist establishes a figure in what is quite literally a very
amorphous ground. This line in the sand has very powerful persuasive consequences.
As a visible annotation of the earth, it becomes a public event that can guide the
Figure2
Post mold.
VISION
PROFESSIONAL
Goodwin]
611
perception of others while further reifying the object that the archaeologist proposes
to be visible in the color patterning in the dirt. The perceptual field provided by the
dirt is enhanced in a work-relevantway by human action on it. Through such highlighting and the subsequent digging that it will help to organize, the archaeologist discursively shapes from the materials provided by the earth the phenomenal objects-that
is, the archaeological features-that are the concerns of his or her profession.
Graphic Representations as Embodied Practice
Most linguists analyzing literacy have focused on the writing of words, sentences, and
other written versions of spoken language. However, graphic representations of many
different types constitute central objects in the discourse of various professions. Scientific talks and papers are best seen not as a purely linguistic text but as a reflexive
commentary on the diagrams, graphs, and photographs that constitute the heart of a
presentation.9 More generally, since the pioneeringworkofLatourandWoolgar (1979),
the central importance of inscriptionsin the organization of scientific knowledge has
become a major focus of research. A theory of discourse that ignored graphic representations would be missing both a key element of the discourse that professionals
engage in and a central locus for the analysis of professional practice. Instead of
mirroring spoken language, th …
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