Limits to Certainty in Interpreting Video Data: Interactional Ethnography and Disciplinary Knowledge

Abstract

This article examines the problem of interpretation by exploring how disciplinary knowledge, or lack thereof, informs interpretations and creates limits to certainty in assessment of observed discipline-based patterns represented on video records. Guided by an interactional ethnographic perspective, and through a (re)analysis of records from a 2-year ethnographic video archive of a high school studio arts class, the authors show how contrastive analysis or triangulation of perspectives (students, teacher, and researcher) and of data (discourse and activity across times and events) provide the basis for developing warranted claims of interpretation of disciplinary knowledge recorded on video.