audio presentations and discourse analysis for the masses

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Hello,

At 15:22 26/09/2002 -0400, Rachel R. Reynolds wrote:

>Audio presentations. I'd like to experiment with computer-based
>presentations for conferences, workshops and classes that include about a
>few minutes-long audio recordings of my informants.

. . .

I've done it with simple web pages, in HTML. You prepare the web page, you
link the audio segments to it, and you project it with a video
projector.  The good thing about HTML is its portability: presentations,
web pages, burning CD's with the files for distribution among interested
public, etc.

Sound editing programs: Don't go for the inexpensive ones, start with the
FREE or shareware ones. I've basically used and use Goldwave and CoolEdit.

Now, how to do it?
1) Digitalize sound fragment with Goldwave, CoolEdit, or your computer
recording software program.
2) Either use these WAV files or convert them to MP3 or RealAudio. I've
used RealAudio in the past because I'm familiar with the syntax to link
them in web pages.
3) Prepare a text file in HTML (easy) and link the audio segments to it.

>On a much more interesting note, I intend to experiment with a discourse
>analysis presentation for non-linguists, seeing if these technological
>tools make the close examination of discourse any way more accessible to
>the untrained.

My experience with presentations is that, even with linguists (not to say
"non-linguists" ;-) ) 20 minutes amounts to nothing in terms of one's being
able to explain what's going on in discourse. So, the simpler the
transcription, the shorter the examples, and the more dynamic (multimedia)
and focused the presentation, the better. Only thing we lack yet in order
to maintain people's attention in conferences is commercial breaks every 5
minutes or some MTV fragment in between.

You raise a very real concern about what type of work on discourse can be
presented in "scientific" conferences. I can think only of ONE time when I
finished my talk without having the unresting impression that I had missed
the main point, or many important points, or that I had forgotten to
comment on such or such presumably important aspect of the text, or that
the whole thing sounded plainly trivial, or...

It is obvious that until we're able to explain to the "public" that the
little things we observe in talk are regularities that somehow reflect
humans' construction of the world, society, and the self, those phenomena
run the risk of sounding just like curious events which are a product of
the inherent variability of human behavior, so what?

In that sense, I think, much more work should be done on the human
foundational nature of the language ability, that is, we should know more
(at least I feel *I* should know much more) about, simply, what is the
general design of language and communication.

In my experience, microanalysis may become a very unsatisfying and even
boring activity because of its focus on particularities. I really don't
know what could be done to "recruit graduate students" for a field of
knowledge and research ("discourse") which is increasingly marginal,
underfunded, uninteresting and even uncomfortable for the elites'
overarching project of economic globalization. We're heading more and more
toward an "applied" view of knowledge, right?, and it's really hard to
apply our foundings about discourse non-critically. So, why fund such research?

Cheers,
-celso

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/