C Greiffenhagen
Biographic Data
| ID | 58691 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Greiffenhagen |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Greiffenhagen |
| SIGNATURE | GREIFFENHAGEN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7544-9246 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 179 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Student writing in higher education
In this article, recordings of academic supervision interactions are examined to inform a discussion of how ‘texts’ and ‘practices’ have been conceptualized in Academic Literacies (AL) research. AL perspectives have contributed to a shift in focus, from texts as linguistic objects to the practices in which texts are embedded. With a starting point in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we demonstrate the relevance of proximal textual prac…
Back to the Control Room
Control rooms have long been a key domain of investigation in HCI and CSCW as sites for understanding distributed work and fragmented settings, as well as the role and design of digital technologies in that work. Although research has tended to focus mainly on ‘command and control’ configurations, such as rail transport, ambulance dispatch, air traffic and CCTV rooms, centres of coordination shaped by artistic and performative concerns have much …
The disciplined customer
This article studies customers entering automated self-service hotels in China and using a facial recognition kiosk for registration. Based on video recordings of 674 cases of customers checking in, we show that, as is common in self-service, customers need to do work that was previously done by hotel staff: They are working customers. We then argue that, when interacting with the facial recognition kiosk, customers are also doing something more:…
Sequence Facilitation
Completing a sequence of actions is a basic problem of social organization for participants. When a first pair-part is addressed to a not yet fully competent member, such as a young child, a third party can facilitate the completion of the sequence through diverse linguistic, embodied, and material practices. In this article, we examine such sequence facilitation in a perspicuous setting: grandparent-mediated video calls between migrant parents a…
Checking correctness in mathematical peer review
Mathematics is often treated as different from other disciplines, since arguments in the field rely on deductive proof rather than empirical evidence as in the natural sciences. A mathematical paper can therefore, at least in principle, be replicated simply by reading it. While this distinction is sometimes taken as the basis to claim that the results in mathematics are therefore certain, mathematicians themselves know that the published literatu…
Judging Importance before Checking Correctness
Peer review has never been a uniform practice but is now more diverse than ever. Despite a vast literature, little is known of how different disciplines organize peer review. This paper draws on ninety-five qualitative interviews with editors and publishers and several hundred written reports to analyze the organization of peer review in pure mathematics. This article focuses on the practice of “quick opinions” at top journals in mathematics: ask…
Spannungen in Garfinkels Programm der Studies of Work
Configuring Prospective Sensations
Using video recordings of the setup phase of cognitive neuroscience experiments, we examine episodes where experimenters show and tell participants how a particular tool (a 'blunt needle') will be used and how that might feel. We analyze how experimenters describe and demonstrate prospective sensations for participants. We show that experimenters often describe sensations 'by negation' (saying what participants will not experience) and sometimes …
Orchestrated openings in video calls
Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of Mathematics
Programming Visuals, Visualising Programs
This article examines the role of visualisations in astrophysics programming work, showing that visualisations are not only outputs for those producing them, but can help those developing them understand how to do their work. Studies of visualization in programming have mainly been of social and cultural factors influencing scientific research. We concentrate on the material aspects of scientific work, as of interest in their own right and on met…
Searching for Ideas in Working up a Visual Image
The empirical basis of this study is the examination of audio and video records of a screen-focussed classroom activity that involved the use of a newly developed software system designed to enable understanding of and reflection on literary works through the depiction of those works in the form of an on-screen storyboard. The central attention is on the way in which two pupils compose, in collaboration, an additional image for their shared story…
The mundane experience of everyday calorie trackers
In this article, we build on the work of Ruckenstein and Pantzar, who have demonstrated how our understanding of self-tracking has been influenced by the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS). To complicate this very selective picture of self-tracking, we shift the focus in understanding self-tracking from members of the QS community to the experiences of ‘ordinary man and woman’. Therefore, we interviewed ‘everyday calorie trackers’, people who h…
Closing seminars and lectures
Based on an analysis of naturally occurring interactions between lecturers and students, this article investigates how university lectures and seminars are brought to a close through the collaborative work of lecturers and students. The analysis focuses on, first, the resources that lecturers and students have to accomplish this (which include not just speech but also embodied conduct, as well as references to clock time and lesson phases); secon…
What would Wittgenstein say about social media
Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (for example, boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging …
Mathematical Equations as Durkheimian Social Facts
Durkheim's influence is very directly felt in one of the central contributions to the sociology of mathematics, that of David Bloor. To Bloor, mathematical statements invite a neo-Durkheimian approach, since they are experienced as Durkheimian facts, being external to individuals and endowed with a coercive power. A neo-Durkheimian perspective insists that they are, rather, social facts. Here, Sociologists often draw on Wittgenstein's reflections…
Wild interdisciplinarity
Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service was a project funded by an ‘in-the-wild’ research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar …
Statistical Practice
As a contribution to current debates on the 'social life of methods', in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which 'methods', here quantitative me…
The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions
This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despi…
Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena
Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after-the-fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science …
The materiality of mathematics
Sociology has been accused of neglecting the importance of material things in human life and the material aspects of social practices. Efforts to correct this have recently been made, with a growing concern to demonstrate the materiality of social organization, not least through attention to objects and the body. As a result, there have been a plethora of studies reporting the social construction and effects of a variety of material objects as we…
Visual grammar in practice
It is generally acknowledged that we live in an increasingly visual culture, populated with a variety of visual objects. Researchers have recently started to investigate the underlying regularities, the “visual grammar,” according to which these objects are assembled. While most existing studies base their analysis on products (such as advertisements, movies or pages from newspapers), this paper studies the processes through which such products a…
Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back
In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh’s formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgical frontstage–backstage analogy and his cl…
From Methodology to Methodography
Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scru…
Visual repairables
This article reports some (video-recorded) instances of `visual culture' in action, namely the use of a new software tool designed for the visualization of scenes from Shakespeare's Macbeth in a classroom context. By considering whether or how far conversation analysis (CA) can be extended from natural conversation to cases of collaborative work in front of a computer, the article addresses the methodological question of how to study instances of…
The materiality of mathematics
Sociology has been accused of neglecting the importance of material things in human life and the material aspects of social practices. Efforts to correct this have recently been made, with a growing concern to demonstrate the materiality of social organization, not least through attention to objects and the body. As a result, there have been a plethora of studies reporting the social construction and effects of a variety of material objects as we…
The mundane experience of everyday calorie trackers
In this article, we build on the work of Ruckenstein and Pantzar, who have demonstrated how our understanding of self-tracking has been influenced by the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS). To complicate this very selective picture of self-tracking, we shift the focus in understanding self-tracking from members of the QS community to the experiences of ‘ordinary man and woman’. Therefore, we interviewed ‘everyday calorie trackers’, people who h…
Statistical Practice
As a contribution to current debates on the 'social life of methods', in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which 'methods', here quantitative me…
Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena
Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after-the-fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science …
Orchestrated openings in video calls
The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions
This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despi…
Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back
In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh’s formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgical frontstage–backstage analogy and his cl…
From Methodology to Methodography
Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scru…
Visual repairables
This article reports some (video-recorded) instances of `visual culture' in action, namely the use of a new software tool designed for the visualization of scenes from Shakespeare's Macbeth in a classroom context. By considering whether or how far conversation analysis (CA) can be extended from natural conversation to cases of collaborative work in front of a computer, the article addresses the methodological question of how to study instances of…
Wild interdisciplinarity
Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service was a project funded by an ‘in-the-wild’ research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar …
Where do the limits of experience lie? Abandoning the dualism of objectivity and subjectivity
The relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' features of social reality (and between 'subjectivist' and 'objectivist' sociological approaches) remains problematic within social thought. Phenomenology is often taken as a paradigmatic example of subjectivist sociology, since it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors' 'subjective' interpretations, thereby neglecting 'objective' social structures. In this article, we question whether…
Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of Mathematics
Two Concepts of Attachment to Rules
In this paper, we discuss some implications of John Rawls' paper 'Two Concepts of Rules' (1955) for social science. We argue that Rawls' notion of 'practice' is not a straightforward contribution to sociological theory, but rather re-orients the idea of what understanding social actions might be. We explicate how Rawls' distinction between 'summary' and 'practice' views of rules might play out in approaching mathematical practice and mathematical…
Logical Relativism
Logical relativism is the claim that different cultures may think according to \ndifferent logical laws. For example, it is often argued that whereas ‘we’ (Westerners) \noperate according to the law of the excluded middle, ‘they’ (e.g., the Chinese or the \nAzande) may not. In this article, we question whether logical relativism is an empirical \nthesis, i.e., a thesis that is substantiated through anthropological examples. \nWe distinguish two f…
What would Wittgenstein say about social media
Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (for example, boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging …
Linguistic relativism
Mathematical Relativism
This article is part of a critical analysis of the way empirical examples feature in arguments for cultural relativism, which we take to be the thesis that logic, grammar, and mathematics are, in some sense, only locally valid1. Our interest lies in pinning down just what “in some sense” might amount to. In companion papers (Greiffenhagen and Sharrock, forthcoming a,b) we deal with logical and linguistic relativism, while in this article we discu…
Checking correctness in mathematical peer review
Mathematics is often treated as different from other disciplines, since arguments in the field rely on deductive proof rather than empirical evidence as in the natural sciences. A mathematical paper can therefore, at least in principle, be replicated simply by reading it. While this distinction is sometimes taken as the basis to claim that the results in mathematics are therefore certain, mathematicians themselves know that the published literatu…
Judging Importance before Checking Correctness
Peer review has never been a uniform practice but is now more diverse than ever. Despite a vast literature, little is known of how different disciplines organize peer review. This paper draws on ninety-five qualitative interviews with editors and publishers and several hundred written reports to analyze the organization of peer review in pure mathematics. This article focuses on the practice of “quick opinions” at top journals in mathematics: ask…
Closing seminars and lectures
Based on an analysis of naturally occurring interactions between lecturers and students, this article investigates how university lectures and seminars are brought to a close through the collaborative work of lecturers and students. The analysis focuses on, first, the resources that lecturers and students have to accomplish this (which include not just speech but also embodied conduct, as well as references to clock time and lesson phases); secon…
Sequence Facilitation
Completing a sequence of actions is a basic problem of social organization for participants. When a first pair-part is addressed to a not yet fully competent member, such as a young child, a third party can facilitate the completion of the sequence through diverse linguistic, embodied, and material practices. In this article, we examine such sequence facilitation in a perspicuous setting: grandparent-mediated video calls between migrant parents a…
Configuring Prospective Sensations
Using video recordings of the setup phase of cognitive neuroscience experiments, we examine episodes where experimenters show and tell participants how a particular tool (a 'blunt needle') will be used and how that might feel. We analyze how experimenters describe and demonstrate prospective sensations for participants. We show that experimenters often describe sensations 'by negation' (saying what participants will not experience) and sometimes …
Mathematical Relativism
This article is part of a critical analysis of the way empirical examples feature in arguments for cultural relativism, which we take to be the thesis that logic, grammar, and mathematics are, in some sense, only locally valid1. Our interest lies in pinning down just what “in some sense” might amount to. In companion papers (Greiffenhagen and Sharrock, forthcoming a,b) we deal with logical and linguistic relativism, while in this article we discu…
Logical Relativism
Logical relativism is the claim that different cultures may think according to \ndifferent logical laws. For example, it is often argued that whereas ‘we’ (Westerners) \noperate according to the law of the excluded middle, ‘they’ (e.g., the Chinese or the \nAzande) may not. In this article, we question whether logical relativism is an empirical \nthesis, i.e., a thesis that is substantiated through anthropological examples. \nWe distinguish two f…
Linguistic relativism
Unpacking Tasks
Where do the limits of experience lie? Abandoning the dualism of objectivity and subjectivity
The relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' features of social reality (and between 'subjectivist' and 'objectivist' sociological approaches) remains problematic within social thought. Phenomenology is often taken as a paradigmatic example of subjectivist sociology, since it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors' 'subjective' interpretations, thereby neglecting 'objective' social structures. In this article, we question whether…
Visual repairables
This article reports some (video-recorded) instances of `visual culture' in action, namely the use of a new software tool designed for the visualization of scenes from Shakespeare's Macbeth in a classroom context. By considering whether or how far conversation analysis (CA) can be extended from natural conversation to cases of collaborative work in front of a computer, the article addresses the methodological question of how to study instances of…
Two Concepts of Attachment to Rules
In this paper, we discuss some implications of John Rawls' paper 'Two Concepts of Rules' (1955) for social science. We argue that Rawls' notion of 'practice' is not a straightforward contribution to sociological theory, but rather re-orients the idea of what understanding social actions might be. We explicate how Rawls' distinction between 'summary' and 'practice' views of rules might play out in approaching mathematical practice and mathematical…
Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back
In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh’s formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgical frontstage–backstage analogy and his cl…
From Methodology to Methodography
Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scru…
Visual grammar in practice
It is generally acknowledged that we live in an increasingly visual culture, populated with a variety of visual objects. Researchers have recently started to investigate the underlying regularities, the “visual grammar,” according to which these objects are assembled. While most existing studies base their analysis on products (such as advertisements, movies or pages from newspapers), this paper studies the processes through which such products a…
The materiality of mathematics
Sociology has been accused of neglecting the importance of material things in human life and the material aspects of social practices. Efforts to correct this have recently been made, with a growing concern to demonstrate the materiality of social organization, not least through attention to objects and the body. As a result, there have been a plethora of studies reporting the social construction and effects of a variety of material objects as we…
The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions
This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despi…
Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena
Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after-the-fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science …
Mathematical Equations as Durkheimian Social Facts
Durkheim's influence is very directly felt in one of the central contributions to the sociology of mathematics, that of David Bloor. To Bloor, mathematical statements invite a neo-Durkheimian approach, since they are experienced as Durkheimian facts, being external to individuals and endowed with a coercive power. A neo-Durkheimian perspective insists that they are, rather, social facts. Here, Sociologists often draw on Wittgenstein's reflections…
Wild interdisciplinarity
Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service was a project funded by an ‘in-the-wild’ research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar …
Statistical Practice
As a contribution to current debates on the 'social life of methods', in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which 'methods', here quantitative me…
Searching for Ideas in Working up a Visual Image
The empirical basis of this study is the examination of audio and video records of a screen-focussed classroom activity that involved the use of a newly developed software system designed to enable understanding of and reflection on literary works through the depiction of those works in the form of an on-screen storyboard. The central attention is on the way in which two pupils compose, in collaboration, an additional image for their shared story…
The mundane experience of everyday calorie trackers
In this article, we build on the work of Ruckenstein and Pantzar, who have demonstrated how our understanding of self-tracking has been influenced by the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS). To complicate this very selective picture of self-tracking, we shift the focus in understanding self-tracking from members of the QS community to the experiences of ‘ordinary man and woman’. Therefore, we interviewed ‘everyday calorie trackers’, people who h…
Closing seminars and lectures
Based on an analysis of naturally occurring interactions between lecturers and students, this article investigates how university lectures and seminars are brought to a close through the collaborative work of lecturers and students. The analysis focuses on, first, the resources that lecturers and students have to accomplish this (which include not just speech but also embodied conduct, as well as references to clock time and lesson phases); secon…
What would Wittgenstein say about social media
Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (for example, boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging …
Programming Visuals, Visualising Programs
This article examines the role of visualisations in astrophysics programming work, showing that visualisations are not only outputs for those producing them, but can help those developing them understand how to do their work. Studies of visualization in programming have mainly been of social and cultural factors influencing scientific research. We concentrate on the material aspects of scientific work, as of interest in their own right and on met…
Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of Mathematics
Orchestrated openings in video calls
Spannungen in Garfinkels Programm der Studies of Work
Configuring Prospective Sensations
Using video recordings of the setup phase of cognitive neuroscience experiments, we examine episodes where experimenters show and tell participants how a particular tool (a 'blunt needle') will be used and how that might feel. We analyze how experimenters describe and demonstrate prospective sensations for participants. We show that experimenters often describe sensations 'by negation' (saying what participants will not experience) and sometimes …
Computer Science (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Engineering (7 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works)