Small Data: Identifying Phenomena of Inquiry
27/09/2018 (Thursday) 13:00-14:00 E21-G002
Following the bombing of Manchester City Centre in 1996, interview accounts provided by people affected by the bomb were collected; these accounts constitute a corpus of recorded and transcribed talk as data. These “small data” document people’s iterations of areas for future investigation. Borrowing from the work of Harold Garfinkel, Edward Rose, and Harvey Sacks, this paper uses these data not as scaffolds to build a sociological theory but as a record of talk, and how talk is structured. The paper considers how practices of transcription identify orders within people’s talk and makes these available as phenomena of inquiry.