Copyright Sociological Research Online, 1998

Slack, R. S. (1998) 'On the Potentialities and Problems of a WWW Based Naturalistic Sociology'
Sociological Research Online, vol. 3, no. 2, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/2/3.html>

Abstract

This paper argues that the World Wide Web provides a unique opportunity for sociological explication. It contends that sociological uses of the Internet for publication purposes have not as yet taken full advantage of the technology available, producing web facsimiles of printed pages. It highlights the potential for undertaking inquiries which employ the multimedia aspects of WWW technology and extends some of the insights from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis regarding retrievable data.

Keywords:

Ethnography; Ethnomethodology; Reflexivity; Representational Practice; World Wide Web

Introduction

1.1

This paper is intended as a series of critical reflections regarding the manner in which the trade of sociology has employed the resource known as the World Wide Web (WWW). I shall not be concerned here with the 'Internet' per se, but with the recent interest that sociologists have shown for publishing on the World Wide Web in particular.

1.2

It would be folly to suggest that sociology adopt new technology's every twist and turn - because a technology is there does not mean that it should be used. This paper, therefore, is by no means technologically determinist; indeed it aims to engage skeptically (See Crews, 1986) with technology. There is no intention on my part to suggest a Whig history of technology - implying that the available technologies inevitably lead one to ethnomethodology (although as I shall show, I believe that the technologies discussed herein offer a uniquely adequate^[1] medium for reporting sociology). The obverse is also true, ethnomethodology does not of necessity have to adopt these technologies to be ethnomethodology (indeed ethnomethodology has proceeded well without them).

1.3

At base, the aim of the paper is to provoke a discussion of the options available to those doing qualitative sociology. It does not intend commission of what ordinary language philosophers have called 'the naturalistic fallacy'. The concern of this paper is to discuss what is without changing things into what ought to be. Following a Weberian track, one could say that engagement with new technologies follows an if-then course: what follows below is one choice among many.^[2] Rather than suggesting we be led by technology, I propose that we employ its potentialities imaginatively.^[3]

1.4

I do not propose to offer a Cooks' tour of technological alternatives, nor to suggest that technology will save sociology from disappearing into some mixture of applied statistics, journalism,^[4] cultural studies and/or reflexive navel-gazing. Sociologists have dug their own pits, and I believe that we should at best leave them to extricate themselves from these, and at worst advise that they dig no further. The limits of the present work permit only a brief discussion of modes of writing such as hypertext - which will be treated as a species of 'new literary form'.

1.5

My argument may basically be stated as follows: by and large sociologists, in seeing an opportunity to publish via the WWW, have neglected to reflect on the features of the medium that they employ That is to say, a whole new medium has been taken as presenting another opportunity to write in the conventional academic manner. . I would argue that there is a reflexive relationship between the medium in which we present our findings and the manner in which we present these. Sociologists (and others) have neglected the unique adequacy of the medium for doing something more than writing. It may be said that the use of the WWW by sociologists betrays an innate formal conservatism, which may be a symptom of a bid for respectability by those journals publishing on the WWW. The aim of this paper is to suggest that a consideration of the medium and the opportunities that it presents could lead to a reassessment of the aims of online journals.

1.6

Two points should be made at the outset. First, since this paper is itself a publication of the type that it seeks to critique, we may say that it is open to the charge of tu quoque.^[5] This is certainly true. However, in mitigation, we should say that the paper is more of a recommendation to look again than a self- exemplifying text.

1.7

Second, I should point out that my orientation to the topic is ethnomethodological. I contend that such an approach with its attention to in situ society-members' practical activities and its avowed intention to treat these as phenomena in themselves as opposed to some signifier of a sociological variable such as ethnicity, class, gender and the like, avoids some of the problems that continue to beset other modes of sociological inquiry. For me the major strength of ethnomethodology is in its attitude to phenomena of everyday life as topics to be investigated in themselves as opposed to resources upon which to build edifices of sociological explananda. My concern with reflexivity is an instance of one such topic- resource distinction between ethnomethodology and other areas of sociological inquiry. Indeed, as I shall show below, it is a fundamental point in considering the potential of the web for doing sociology from an ethnomethodological standpoint.

1.8

Doubtless many readers will consider the present work sectarian, narrow, relativist and any other number of ad hominem attributes that may be tied to the term ethnomethodology. In response, I would say that having considered the WWW from an ethnomethodological viewpoint, it does constitute an excellent way of doing non-ironic sociology.^[6] However, this is not to say that I am advocating that all those who employ the WWW should be doing ethnomethodology. In short, the possibilities for doing something more than one can say in so many words^[7] is the main motivation for the present paper.

1.9

A desire for critical reflection on the representational technologies of naturalistic sociology in general, and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in particular has motivated the writing of this paper. The 'crisis' which seems to exist within representation - the rise of multivocal texts and confessional literature on fieldwork and fieldnotes - has been the focus of my attention for a number of years. While grounding the paper in ethnomethodology I wish to point to a group of symptoms found in wider sociology. In short there is 'news' here for more than ethnomethodologists.

1.10

Another motivation for the writing of the present paper lies in the essentially uninteresting manner in which technology has been employed by sociologists. It would appear that after the invention of the tape recorder, much of sociology took a deep sigh, sank back into the chair and decided to think very little about the potential of technology for the practical work of doing sociology. Of course, there are sociologists who employ other means of data collection (such as video tape) and retrieval (packages such as SPSS, Ethnograph and NUDIST).^[8] The former, it may be said, are often to be found among those who analyse interactions - the so-called 'micro' sociologies. The latter are employed by a diverse range of sociologists in the analysis of data and the construction of conceptual classes from data.^[9]

1.11

I may have given the impression that sociologists are technologically ignorant - this is certainly not the case; many sociologists are leading the way technologically.^[10] I am concerned more with how sociologists use technology than with how much they employ it. The argument is more about the sociological imagination than the technological fix. In short, I shall argue that there is very little imagination shown by sociologists in the ways in which they employ new technologies. Again I stress that this does not mean that we should be lead by the nose down whatever technological paths present themselves, but that we should be aware of the potentialities of the technologies we use for new modes of representation.

Discussion

2.1

Looking through the two main online journals, Sociological Research Online and The Electronic Journal of Sociology, I notice that very little has changed as regards the form of academic publishing. I only view the papers on a screen as opposed to a piece of paper. Scrolling through each paper, I constantly expect to find something more than a cathode ray tube version of what can be found in the library - more often than not, I remain disappointed.^[11] Certainly there are interesting papers, it would be unfair to suggest otherwise, but there is so much more that could be there.

2.2

Tiring of the same fare, I turn to other sites on the WWW. Looking at CNN-on-line, I can get news in textual form but, should I want them, there are also movies and images available for me to download. While not selecting CNN as an exemplar, it has to be said that their site has something more about it than the journals I read during my working day. I realise that readers may counter that if they had the time, the resources and the staff that CNN have, then they could produce something more than they do at present. That may well be true. Yet, if we say that there is some investment of time within the placing of papers onto online journals, eg. learning how to use HTML and the like, we can say that with a little imagination sociologists could do better.^[12]

2.3

I am not saying that a series of gratuitous 'pretty pictures' should be a substitute for doing the practical work of sociology. Rather, images (be they moving, still, graphs or maps) should add to the text, and not replace it.

2.4

Perhaps a biographical note will help establish some of my concerns and their relation in this paper. During my education as a sociologist, I have seen a transition from notebooks through tape recorders to compact video cameras. Of course, there is a place for each of these within sociological inquiry, but in my own particular area of research - multimedia and computer supported cooperative work, the main tools seem to be video and audio records of 'situated actions' (Suchman, 1987). As an ethnomethodologist who maintains an interest in the philosophy of the human sciences, I am also intrigued by the fashionable concern with reflexivity and self-disclosure^[13] in ethnographic research. It seems to me that the possibilities of multimedia (via the WWW) offer one way of coping with reflexivity, and that they have the upshot of producing more interesting journals in the process - journals that fulfill the potential of the web and provide for a reflexive sociological inquiry.

The Literary Turn

3.1

While it is not the intention of the present work to investigate the rhetorical practices of sociology, we may say that sociological description by and large proceeds through textual means: this much is a commonplace. However, the manner in which sociology establishes its metaphysics of presence has of late become a topic for analysis. I refer here to the 'literary' and 'reflexive' turns in ethnography and the sociology of science respectively (although of course, the two are sometimes blended together).

3.2

We can say that the direction which the turn has taken lends itself to textual formats. We may cite the work of Ashmore (1989), whose thesis parodies the forms of the sociology of scientific knowledge, and whose book both contains the contents of his thesis and feeds upon the notion of the thesis as text. In terms of the turn to literature and textuality, we may cite the work of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and those who follow their lead in what I have called (Slack, 1996) the 'writing culture' school. These anthropologists treat their knowledge claims as the basis for invocations to self- reflection. They suggest that their texts be considered as constructions, and that a central component of the work of their anthropology is to 'expose' their works as constructing knowledge claims.

3.3

As I noted above, all this takes place on a textual level. Arguably, the reflexive turns of sociology have been designed so that they can take place within a text. However, one might wish to steer clear of literary and textual experiments and move towards a more secure anchorage within the reflexivity that is incarnate in the mutually elaborative relationship between members' accounts and the circumstances that they describe. In doing so, one may find an essential reflexivity that is constituted through the in vivo practical actions of members as opposed to a stipulative reflexivity that foregrounds the text and textuality.

3.4

We can argue that stipulative reflexivities could not exist without the essential reflexive dimension to human action since they are derived from this. That is to say the essential reflexivity, realised within the mutually elaborative relations between accounts and the settings they describe is logically prior to the stipulative reflexivities which build their textual edifices atop, and indeed sometimes over and against members' reflexivity.

An Ethnomethodological Alternative

4.1

One of the most interesting things about ethnomethodology is that it is not, as often supposed, subjective in extremis. Rather, the situatedness of its descriptions are (sometimes planfully) misread as invocations to subjectivity. It is just this situatedness that brought about the discussions upon which this paper is based. We may say that sociology aims to build its explananda on a textual version of the metaphysics of presence - quotes, interviews and the like all combine to build up a sense of having been in the field. The opportunities offered to us via the WWW suggest an alternative mode of expressing the metaphysics of presence, one which enhances the detail of our description through preserving what Schwartz (1977) has called the 'phenomenological intactness' of the setting.

4.2

In the cases of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it is most interesting that we have a planfully contexted, situated description of the 'just what happened-ness' of the phenomenon. That is to say, if we take the case of a member doing working at a computer screen, we may describe what she is doing - pressing keys, opening screen menus and so on. This can, of course, be described in writing. However it does seem that the unique attention to what we may call the praxiological particulars of the situation are eminently representable on a video clip. In showing and telling we preserve the phenomenological intactness of the situation and continue with the ethnomethodological/conversation analytic project of presenting 'raw' data so that others may inspect the explicative work one has undertaken on that data.

4.3

It is almost as if the WWW was built for the work of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Readers familiar with conversation analysis will know how the transcription practices devised by Gail Jefferson have been employed to preserve as much local detail from the conversation as is possible using typewriter and paper. I do not propose that we scrap this system in favour of some computer-based version - too much first class, foundational work has been undertaken for this to be an option. However, just as the tape recorder enabled detailed examination of conversations to be made, we may say that the WWW (and latterly the writable CD-ROM), enables these conversations to actually 'appear' on screen as options, together with the transcriptions that realise the work that the interlocutors undertake.

4.4

To be sure, a WWW-based conversation analysis which exceeds the possibilities of the Jeffersonian page-based system (but which builds upon it) is possible. The possibility of both hearing and seeing the interlocutors, together with the transcript profoundly extends the insights of conversation analysis as a discipline.^[14]

4.5

In terms of conversation analysis' cognate discipline, ethnomethodology, we may cite the principle of 'unique adequacy' as advocated by Garfinkel (1967). This principle may be employed within the framework of our discussion to suggest that the use of retrievable data within the context of a paper may provide a hybrid of presentation and explication. Just as the ethnomethodological work of, for example, Stacy Burns was a hybrid between ethnomethodology and the realisation^[15] of becoming a lawyer, we might say that texts together with sound and/or video images form a uniquely adequate way of realising the phenomenon one explicates. We may say that Garfinkel's notion of recovering members' practices in their distinctive entirety is a task uniquely suited to the uniquely adequate blend of media available on the WWW.

4.6

Lynch provides a first class exposition of Garfinkel's focus 'on the act of "writing" as itself the source of a "gap" between the work of composing a text and the retrospectively analysable properties of the resultant document' (Lynch, 1993: p. 289) This 'gap' was perspicuously illustrated by Stacy Burns in Garfinkel's seminar. We may quote the illustration at length:

Burns produced a videotape that framed a typist's hands at an electronic typewriter keyboard. The tape documents the typist's hands working at the keyboard while her voice gives a running commentary of "what she is doing" as she composes the text. The typed document is shown unfolding on a sheet of paper positioned in the carriage while the typist strikes a sequence of keys, crosses out and restarts a passage, and pauses between letters while considering aloud what to do next. The videotape thus frames a distinctive 'pair' of intelligible documents: (1) a 'real-time' video sequence of typing, complete with hesitations and commentary, and (2) a typed page that can be read, copied, and analysed independently of the real-time sequence. (Lynch, 1993: pp. 289 - 290).

4.7

As Lynch points out, the two documents have a different status: the videotape shows the 'lived work' of typing a document,^[16] which - as Lynch points out - displays the 'local history' of the document's production. The text itself elides this production, standing as an already completed set of ideas and the like (paraphrase of Lynch , 1993: p. 290). That is to say, with the provision of the videotape we have some evidence of the production of the text-as-complete-entity, which shows the realisation of the text-as-complete-entity, ie. the making of that text. The two documents are not of the same order since one may be seen as the work of the other.

4.8

For our current purposes, we may follow Lynch in arguing that while the written text is far from opaque, it does not bear the marks of the work that goes into producing it; this work cannot be recovered from the text itself, but only from the tape of the in vivo work of writing that text.^[17] As Lynch points out, the use of texts and other sources by sociologists and others creates a gap which, following Garfinkel we may call the 'missing what'. An extant literature elides the production of that literature as lived work, treating it as a resource upon which to do sociological work. The praxiological turn advocated by ethnomethodology attempts, through the processes described above, to topicalise and through topicalising, to recover that work as a situated achievement.

4.9

On reading the above, it strikes me that many readers would say that it is no news that writing takes place: it is work, and often hard work. Although this is certainly true, I have pointed out that ethnomethodology is concerned with the recoverable how of writing, and not just the fact that people write.^[18].

4.10

How a text comes to be written is also the topic of a recent dispute within the pages of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, wherein disputes about Whyte's Street Corner Society are aired. It seems that such disputes seek to recover, and to critique, the lived work of ethnographic writing undertaken by Whyte. They also trade on the notion that ethnographic writing is a social construction, and concomitantly on the notion that the work of ethnography could have produced something else. While I am sure that Whyte needs no defence from any quarter, I contend that his methodological appendix is an admirable attempt to illustrate the lived work of his doing ethnography and the use of practical reasoning therein. It is this which much reflexive sociology seeks to cope with, but in my opinion it fails because it stipulates reflexivity as opposed to seeing the lived and unfolding nature of that which I have called essential reflexivity.

4.11

In sum, as ethnography moves toward an ever more self-conscious enterprise, those who write have to be aware of the work they undertake qua writers. The display that Burns undertook illustrates one way in which we may topicalise our work as writers. I do not suggest that we tape all that we do, but rather that we should be a little less ashamed about the essentially reflexive^[19] nature of our writing; which may keep us from the forced reflexivity advocated by, for example, those sociologists of science who advocate 'new literary forms'. The fix is neither literary nor technological but in recognising that we have to work with the essential reflexivity (Slack, 1996) of our inquiries. In short, we must maintain contact with the world, not with the text-as-world whatever mode of writing or presentation we choose.

4.12

I should, at this point, say that I do not suggest that the 'pages' of WWW journals be open only to ethnomethodology, nor that sociologists should all be doing ethnomethodology. What I am saying is that journals should be more open to these possible presentations and that authors should engage in sociological work with more imagination vis-a-vis the potential of the media they have at their disposal. To take an example, look at the journal papers on the web sites, their use of the medium is by and large limited to footnotes and references. The use of a hypertext document in this fashion is rather like talking to a person two feet away by telephone. The potential of the medium is there, but it is wasted in doing a task achievable by other means.

4.13

To show that I do not advocate ethnomethodology as the only mode of sociological research to be able to use this media; and that I do not advocate that all publications should sing and dance, let me take the case of the 'literary turn' in ethnography, notably dialogism and polyphony.

4.14

A dialogic text is said to have within it a number of voices, each with a unique 'take' on the events being described. The voices may dispute each other, or they may show each other's claims as constructions - depending upon the predilections of the author. With a hypertext document, we can see that such disputed versions and dialogues may be provided in a manner that enables the reader to switch between versions, weaving their own text as they move through the pages. This would appear to satisfy the avowed principles of such texts, to tell a believable story, amongst other stories. A reader could simply come up with a version that she finds convincing, map it and navigate through or print it out, thus creating one text among a potentially huge number.

4.15

The reflexive turn in the sociology of science could be equally satisfied by such novel techniques. Take for example Woolgar's (1988) photograph of himself doing the work of composing a caption for the photograph itself. Obviously this is a simulation, and it seems to me that Woolgar's ironic position forces him to ignore the status of the photograph qua simulation. However, if Woolgar were so minded he could easily have video-taped himself creating a caption for the scene, including of course, a video monitor showing the work in progress! All of this could then be placed onto a WWW page and voila! a reflexive text without the trick(ery).^[20]

4.16

What of those sociologists who have something to say, and want to say it in the fashion that they have always said it? They would have no problem in doing this. It is only if the textual and presentational modes that I have suggested become standard that one would expect problems. Readers may ponder for themselves how likely such an occurrence is.

Conclusions

5.1

Most of the papers that are to be found on the WWW do not exploit the full potential of the medium. It is fair to say that most do not have either need nor intention to do so. This is not to say that they are in any way dull or unimaginative sociologically, indeed I have enjoyed reading papers on WWW journals. The plain fact is that publishing on the WWW allows journals to be set up with comparatively little outlay, especially as compared to printed journals. In these days of a publish or perish ethos, we should be grateful that there is a possibility to get work published at all.

5.2

However, given the potential of the medium we can say that some sociological possibilities have not been taken up. Imagine how much more, sociologically speaking, one could obtain from a paper that employs the full range of representational technologies offered by the WWW. This is not to say that we should use them gratuitously, being led here and there by the vagaries of technology, but we must at least realise their potential in doing sociology. Some sociologists have come to understand that their work is in part visual (See inter alia Ball and Smith [1992]), and that photographs and video^[21] tapes are as important as other types of text.^[22]

5.3

I have oriented myself to ethnomethodology throughout this text, but it is possible to argue that the use of the technologies mentioned herein might also benefit other modes of research within the human sciences. For example, cognitive science could employ video-based methodologies for the analysis of situated cognition. I would also suggest that disciplines such as componential analysis and the ethnography of communication could benefit from the use of retrievable data presentations of this type.

5.4

The work of J. R. E. Lee and D. R. Watson (1993) on the uses of public space undertaken under the Plain Urban project in France suggests a method for video analysis of interactions and the conduct of locomotion. The studies undertaken by Lee and Watson are certainly rich in their descriptions of members' conduct in public space, yet their explication could have been even more detailed if the medium allowed them to use their video data. Such an approach would allow both a showing and a telling - being truly a 'commentary machine' in Sacks' (1963) use of the term. Moreover, this information could be placed on the web comparatively simply through the use of any of the available proprietary packages.

5.5

The mode of explication I advocate has a relatively short history, beginning with the work of Christian Heath (1986). Heath attempts to use line drawings to attend to the non-verbal elements of medical encounters. His work seems to me to cry out for hypertext or CD-ROM. It is telling that the more recent exemplars of the research that I advocate have based their work on CD-ROM. Leslie Jarmon's (1996) doctoral thesis employs CD-ROM technology to show how members employ hand and body movements in the constructions of turns at talk. Work of this type can only supplement the power of conversation analytic findings, and yet there are few outlets for such novel presentations.^[23]

5.6

In the end, the problem of course is that there is little if any outlet for such explications, forcing sociologists to return to the printed page. For the present author it is bizarre that the Journal of Visual Anthropology is to my knowledge available only in paper copies. If ever a journal should be on the web or CD-ROM, then one surely it is Visual Anthropology.

5.7

By way of a conclusion, I am led to ask if now is the time for the sociological community, whatever their analytic mentalities, to realise that the WWW offers a unique mode of explication, a means of saying more than they could in words. Perhaps it is only then that we may achieve a more accountable sociology.

Notes

¹ I shall explain this term below.

² While not endorsing the accompanying moral vocabularies, the options range from total adoption of any and all technologies as intrinsically good, through skeptical engagement to what one might regard as a form of Luddism.

³ Thus it is a case of making the technology work for our purposes - to say something more in and through the technology not because of it.

⁴ Pace R. E. Park.

⁵ However, we may say that the present work is another way of 'writing past' (Ashmore, 1989) the tu quoque.

⁶ By this I mean that in the use of audio-visual materials, we may bring about a sociology that shows as well as tells. I shall return to this point later in the paper.

⁷ As readers may know, this phrase has been employed by Garfinkel and Sacks (1970 [1986]) and by Heritage and Watson (1980) to describe the practices of glossing. It would not be unfair to say that my aim here is to present a more accountable sociology - in the ethnomethodological sense of the term.

⁸ Which we shall discuss below.

⁹ Although such users rarely topicalise the work of tagging and categorising the data. I am grateful to A. P. Carlin of the University of Stirling for this notion of topicalising (which, I believe stands as a first class way of understanding the project of ethnomethodology), and for discussing the points made herein with me.

¹⁰ The work of Professor W. W. Sharrock at the University of Manchester, and of Professor J. A. Hughes at the University of Lancaster, together with their colleagues in their respective institutions and at Rank Xerox stand as exemplary studies in this area.

¹¹ As A. P. Carlin (personal communication) has pointed out, we might usefully compare the relative inertness of the WWW journal contributions with the web pages of their institutions. It is my hope that sociologists will not come to use technology in the manner they use fieldnotes - rich in private but poor in public. Technology should not be relegated to singing dancing homepages, it is a powerful explicative instrument not a curiosity.

¹² Of course, it may well be the case that the papers are prepared for 'the web' by use of some package such as HTML-Assistant or Adobe Page Mill. If this is the case, it seems that there is an even greater opportunity for sociologists to employ the potentialities of the form - perhaps through the imaginative use of such packages.

¹³ I am tempted to call this 'reflexivity by revelation'.

¹⁴ Readers may however like to examine the possibilities offered by Ten Have at: <http://www.pscw.uva.nl/emca/transcr.htm>.

¹⁵ I am grateful to Dr D. R. Watson of the University of Manchester for this word. His use stresses the notion of making real through situated practice, as opposed to the mentalistic use contained within, eg. 'I just realised'. Such phrases move us away from the notion that reality is [merely] socially constructed, inviting us to consider the logical grammar of words as they work within our analytic mentality.

¹⁶ Readers are invited to compare this treatment of the work of writing with that of Woolgar (1988).

¹⁷ We may consider the premium that collectors place on manuscripts as an instance of the value of recovering the lived work of writing. I have taken the time to study a copy of such a manuscript, a poem by Dylan Thomas, which shows the marginalia within his work of writing a poem - my respect for his work was enhanced by the recoverable details of his writing, especially the drafts and half-started phrases. Readers may see a printed example of this in some editions of Thomas's Collected Poems.

¹⁸ The current 'fieldnotes' debate in anthropology is an illustration of the reluctance to explicate the detailed how of writing. It is as if writing anthropology were some arcane practice for which fieldnotes stand as a reluctant proxy.

¹⁹ That is to say, the manner in which our accounts and the circumstances they describe elaborate each other.

²⁰ My apologies to Woolgar if I have just re-invented the Time Relay Inversion Camera (Klystron), (Woolgar [editor] 1988, p. 34, note 16).

²¹ Dr D. R. Watson (personal communication) has pointed out that a journal Video Sociology edited by A. Blumenstiel was available a number of years ago. Unfortunately, this journal has now ceased publication. Publishers might serve sociology well by presenting back copies of the journal on CD-ROM. It is my hope that some readers may attempt to re- establish the work that Blumenstiel began. We should also note the work of J. Driessen who employs video-tape materials in his analysis of the work of a governmental land management agency . Driessen uses tapes to re-present the practical actions of the personnel within the context of training films. We might, following the ethnomethodological orientation of the present work, note that Driessen's tapes form a gloss wherein the work of the personnel is re-presented to them. The folding back of the text illustrates just what that text and work was comprised of as a series of practical actions - this is similar in character to what Garfinkel and Sacks (1970 [1986]) refer to as 'Rose's gloss'.

²² However, we might say that the term 'data' which is so often used to describe these materials parallels the debate in anthropology regarding fieldnotes. In the latter case, Sanjek (1991) has argued that fieldnotes are often the bearers of experience from 'the field' and that researchers are reluctant to allow others to examine their notebooks since they constitute a 'warts and all' anthropological self-disclosure.

²³ Significantly, Jarmon's thesis is also relatively cheap to reproduce - copies being available for as little as US $6.

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Copyright Sociological Research Online, 1998