Interactive and Historical Processes of Distributing Statistical Concepts Through Work Organization

Abstract

In this article, we analyze interactive processes through which research groups and their statistical advisors insert new (for researchers) statistical concepts into existing research practice. Through processes of talk-in-interaction (speaking, gesture, and inscription), they assemble specimens, research workers, devices, algorithms, and texts, in alternative representations of future work. Alternate assemblies are compared, edited, and projected into future activity, in clients' projects and in publications, where they are viewed over a longer project history. As achievements of local interaction, assemblies have an interactive structure that builds from, and contrasts with, accounts of historically prior practice, involves joint imagination of new combinations of human judgment, with technology (e.g., statistical algorithms), and includes deliberate efforts to evaluate and edit future work activity. Speakers animate orders of work as laminar, narrative structures that deploy time, place, and human/technical agency in consequentially different ways. These alternative assemblies are produced during conversations in which client research projects have been disrupted or suspended in the hope of finding a better way to work in the future. In this sense, learning about new technical concepts that will be realized at a collective level of analysis is anticipated and given structure in local processes of interaction. We conclude with a discussion of how technical concepts are extended in scope and meaning as they are distributed through work organization.

Notes

¹All names are pseudonyms.

²Transcripts number turns for identified speakers, breaking lines at thematic boundaries and inserting cartoon-like strips of digital images for action or gestural sequences that are important for our analysis. Unless otherwise noted, EMPHATIC speech is shown in upper case, stre:::tched enunciation is shown with repeated colons, ((action descriptions)) are shown in italics within double parentheses, matching equal signs (= =) across turns indicate no pause in speaking, and [overlapping talk is marked with [matching square brackets across speaking turns.