Research at the Intersection of Reference and Repair: Introduction to the Special Issue

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Clare Jackson, Danielle Jones, Pierra Margutti, Chiara Monzoni, and Susan Speer, who contributed to the early development of the project in Summer 2008 but who were not able to continue their involvement thereafter. Special thanks to Victoria Land, who remained involved with the project, acted as Collections Manager, contributed to data sessions for more than a year subsequently, and whose participation has been immensely valuable to the development of the research reported here.

Notes

¹It may be worth mentioning the resources we used to share data and work on it collectively, so as to make possible this kind of “big team” Conversation Analytic project and do so at very little expense—which is important because ours is an unfunded project. Of course, some of us have had face-to-face meetings over the last 2 years—at visits to each other's universities and at conferences. But for the most part, the project has relied on three electronic resources: (a) a shared Dropbox folder: Dropbox is a simple online storage utility that allowed us to store and share files and folders across the Internet using file synchronization. All participants sent their data entries by specified deadlines to a Collections Manager (a rotating post) for cataloguing and indexing in Dropbox. Data entries were standardized such that each was composed of a folder containing the audio or video clip, the transcript of it, and analytic notes about the case (answering a set of prespecified questions we devised collectively). Each data folder has a unique collection identification number and data identification tag (which concludes with the initials of the person who submitted the extract); (b) a Google Group: The iRepair Google Group offered a free mailing list service that enables discussion threads, and we also used the group to build a shared online annotated bibliography (with links to the articles themselves where possible); (c) videoconferencing (via iChat or Skype and more recently Google+ “Hangout” because more than four sites could be accommodated): These chats were used to some extent to coordinate work on the project, but their foremost use was for extended data analysis sessions and intensive discussion of draft articles by the small teams working on the individual papers. Taken together, these electronic aids allowed a widely distributed team of researchers to collaborate easily and effectively without external funding to support the project.

²Others refer to: places (e.g., “here” repaired to “at the temple”; “tam/there” repaired to “v Maskve/in Moscow”); times (e.g., “then” repaired to “when it goes”); activities (e.g., “do it” repaired to “have the baby at home”); objects (e.g., “it” repaired to “the wax”; “that” repaired to “that knee”); and to less tangible entitites (e.g., “it” repaired to “commonsense”; “them” repaired to “sit ups, pull ups”; “that” repaired to “dilemma”).