Editorial

 

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies on Human Sociality – an open access online journal for analyses of sense-making practices in naturally occurring social interaction as well as methodological and conceptual discussions for empirically based studies.

 The study of how members of society organize their private and professional lives through systematic and recognizable social practices has a long tradition through the work of Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, amongst many others. Social practices are organized through the mobilization of a variety of resources  - talk, the human body, tangible and digital objects, touch and smell - in a constantly changing material and temporal environment. Social Interaction aims to be a forum for discussing cutting edge research into all aspects of human sociality.

 Contemporary technologies have dramatically changed how social scientists work today. Especially the use of video recordings is now widespread. This no longer means heavy and expensive equipment – small cameras like the GoPro are fairly cheap, and can easily be mounted on lamps, walls or helmets. Even smartphones provide excellent video and audio quality. And new types of cameras, like 360-degree cameras are becoming increasingly available, which gives the researcher access to other kinds of data and perspectives. As a result, data collection often means multi-camera recordings and large data collections.

 Video/audio recordings are frequently shared between colleagues, discussed during data sessions or presented at academic conferences.  However, access to the data typically disappears when papers are published. Although providing readers access to the data is not unproblematic for technical and ethical reasons, it is a paradox if we remember Harvey Sack’s argument for using (audio) recordings – so “others could look at what I had studied and make of it what they could, if, for example, they wanted to be able to disagree with me” (Sacks, 1984: 26). Only a few publishers upload data examples to their website and provide the link in the written paper. And, on occasion, authors upload examples to their personal website. This means, however, that readers have to switch between the printed paper (or pdf) and the data examples. Even when this is possible it is tedious work for the reader.

 Social Interaction seeks to overcome this by allowing audio or video clips to be embedded directly into the online publication. In this way, readers have direct access to the data at any point in the article where an analytic argument is being made. Thus, the articles in the journal are primarily meant to be read as online publications.

 The first issue features four articles. Drew & Kendrick show how visible searches in the environment may be a way to recruit assistance from a co-participant. Greer provides a longitudinal study of how a visitor to a family learns to perform the family ritual of saying grace. Nevile shows how objects in cars are made relevant for participants’ ongoing action. Hoey analyzes how speaking and drinking are coordinated in environments in which the selected next-speaker is drinking.

 Launching a journal is not done singlehandedly, and we would like to thank Mie Femø Nielsen and Johannes Wagner for their collaboration in shaping the main ideas of the journal; the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics and Centre for Interaction Research and Communication Design at Copenhagen University and the research unit Professional Interaction and Practice (www.pipe.sdu.dk) at the University of Southern Denmark for financial support; Max Eckardt and Mobile Labs for technical support; Jakob Dalgaard Wissing for student assistance; and Rie Iversen, Jesper Thestrup and Niels Erik Frederiksen from the Royal Danish Library. Finally we would like to thank the contributors to the inaugural issue for their patience and constructive feedback.

 We hope you will enjoy this and future issues on human sociality, and we are pleased to invite new submissions for upcoming issues.

The editors

Kristian Mortensen, PhD, associate professor, University of Southern Denmark

Brian Due, PhD, associate professor, University of Copenhagen