"Click on the big red car"

I've just finished about four days of really hard slog. Today, I'm thinking about how hard work looks like "not much" when reduced to a line on the CV. nothing can be done about that, but it takes a lot of determination to keep going sometimes.

On Thursday I produced a proposal for the CA/MCA symposium in Brisbane for later in the year. For that I selected a section of a recording of children playing a Wiggles game. It's pretty interesting interaction. I called the paper something like "Click on the big red car": An analysis of an extended sequence in computer game playing.". Although the data are new, I will be returning to the idea of "an extended sequence", a concept that i played with in my phD but didn't really bring to a satisfactory conclusion. in the case of this new work, what will make the extended sequence even more interesting is that the social interaction is around a Wiggles computer game.

Yesterday, I put up my AERA proposal (with about two hours to spare before the cutoff time). I wasn't so much rushing, as I've been working on the proposal for over three weeks, but just finding it tricky to manage aspects of a conceptual review rather than the CA analysis that i usually do.Anyhow, I've put it up within "qualitative inquiry" and I hope it gets up. People have told me that San Diego is an interesting place, and going to AERA has become something of an annual event for me, so fingers crossed.

Today, I'm going to start fleshing out ideas for a small research project to do with transcription. there appears to be very few studies of transcription so I think my idea is a go-er. if so, then I will have two research projects running in tandem, and of course, I will have to write the journal article that formed the basis for the AERA proposal.

plenty to do, right?