Interaction Analysis as an Embodied and Interactive Process: Multimodal, Co-operative, and Intercorporeal Ways of Seeing Video Data as Complementary Professional Visions

Abstract

The analysis of video-recorded interaction consists of various professionalized ways of seeing participant behavior through multimodal, co-operative, or intercorporeal lenses. While these perspectives are often adopted simultaneously, each creates a different view of the human body and interaction. Moreover, microanalysis is often produced through local practices of sense-making that involve the researchers’ bodies. It has not been fully elaborated by previous research how adopting these different ways of seeing human behavior influences both what is seen from a video and how it is seen, as well as the way the interpretation of the data ultimately unfolds in the interaction between researchers. In this article, we provide a theoretical-methodological discussion of the microanalytic research process. We explore how it differs from “seeing” affect in interaction either as a co-operative and multimodal action or as an intercorporeal experience. First, we introduce the multimodal conversation analytic, co-operative, and intercorporeal approaches to microanalysis. Second, we apply and compare these practices to a video-recorded interaction of a romantic couple. Furthermore, we examine a video-recorded episode of us, the researchers, reflecting on our analytic observations about this interaction. We suggest that adopting a multimodal and co-operative perspective constructs affect as co-produced and displayed through observable action, while an intercorporeal perspective produces affect as an embodied and experienced phenomenon. While the former enables locating affect in a specific moment and identifiable body parts, the latter facilitates recognizing the experienced side of affect. These different modes of professional vision complement one another in capturing affect in interaction while being fundamentally used in local interactions between the researchers.

The role of embodied scaffolding in revealing “enactive potentialities” in intergenerational science exploration

“…At this stage, we adopted a microanalytical approach, drawing from (e.g., Goodwin, 1994, 2018). This approach focuses on analyzing communicative behaviors at a micro scale, and “rests on the notion that social interaction is organized through the observable actions and practices of participants, with which members of the collective make sense of each other's actions using a wide spectrum of embodied resources” (Katila & Raudaskoski, 2020, p. 448). Thus, it is interested in the process of interaction, foregrounding its multimodal nature (e.g., Price et al, 2022).…”

Forms of professional interkinesthesia in nurses' body work: A case study of an infant's stepping

“…This microanalytic approach stems from a wide field of qualitative studies focused on the intercorporeal, multimodal, multisensorial, and other semiotic aspects of naturally occurring face-toface interactions (Streeck et al, 2011;Goodwin, 2018;Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018;Katila, 2018). Our co-operative and intercorporeal perspective on microanalysis draws on embodied and experienced understandings of human action, and it is especially helpful for the study of embodied resources, such as affect, touch and interkinesthetic sociality (see Katila and Philipsen, 2019;Katila and Raudaskoski, 2020;Katila and Turja, 2021;Philipsen and Katila, 2021). With videoanalysis, it is possible to analyze embodied, communicative aspects of interaction, and to determine how these aspects are manufactured together by the participants through their mutually elaborating body movements and orientations.…”

“…Moreover, by drawing on an inherently social and intercorporeal understanding of human bodies (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), we pay careful attention to how participants, in their interactions as living bodies, directly participate in and sense the social meanings implied in each other's actions. In terms of analysis, this intercorporeal starting point also requires the adoption of the researchers' own bodies to co-empathize with the communicative meanings experienced by the participants in the interactions that are revealed in the video data (Katila and Philipsen, 2019;Katila and Raudaskoski, 2020;Katila and Turja, 2021).…”

Bringing the body into play: The corporeal aspect in second language acquisition

“…Subjective meaning is bound to an individual's (inter)corporeal as well as (inter)personal experiences of past and present events, and their preconscious somatic responses to and proactive dealings with them; it is also bound up in each individual learner's momentary dynamic positioning (in the passive and in the active) in the fabric of social structures and discourses. However, some corporeal aspects of how learners are making sense of their own and others’ semiotic activities can be studied by micro‐analyzing their observable, moment‐by‐moment verbal and nonverbal behavior, as Katila and Raudaskoski (2020) have demonstrated for conversation analysis (by videotaping the interactions and analyzing perceivable bodily signifiers).…”

“…Phenomenologically oriented research emphasizes a corporeal or intercorporeal perspective on the learners as actually living the studied resonances and affects, while also being cognizant of the embodied perspective of the researcher(s). An empathetic embodied approach to interpreting perceivable (inter)corporeality in SLA processes has the potential to capture some of the complexity of experienced, expressive, lived, felt, and performed forms of behavior, but it does not resolve the challenge of providing “evidence” of such living and lived phenomena (Katila & Raudaskoski, 2020). The existing criteria of validity of research findings are currently too inflexible to account for evidence of living and lived aspects of subjective, (inter)corporeally emergent L2 learning processes without misrepresenting them in seemingly objective, higher order structures of scientific analysis.…”