2015 Volume 66 Issue 1 Pages 39-56
This article aims to describe practices that help participants in talk-in-interactions share their images. In recent years, there has been growing interest in the collaborative nature of imagination. However, few attempts have been made at identifying the empirical practices that help participants share images. This article focuses on the practice of sharing images using both verbal and non-verbal behaviors, such as posture and gesture. Through conducting field work in a project team that is constructing a permanent science museum installation and detailed interaction analysis of the meeting interactions between members of the team, we find that reconciling a bodily orientation toward the depiction of images and a bodily orientation toward face-to-face interaction by verbal and non-verbal configurations of interaction enables participants to be both depictive in representing and explaining images and interactive in securing inter-subjectivity with recipients at any one time. We identified “head turning” behavior as a practice by which tellers can coordinate a bodily orientation toward description and face-to-face interaction. This practice enables participants in talk-in-interactions to describe members' verbal and non-verbal behavior as “sharing images” as a sociological description. Detailed examination of this practice shows how group members share their images in meeting interactions in order to work through organizational issues or problems.
