Conversation Analysis Methods for Understanding Online Talk

As social media and other texted-based computer-mediated communication become more prevalent, qualitative researchers have sought appropriate methods to make sense of this type of interaction. Conversation analysis was initially developed as a method for understanding naturally occurring talk that took place via telephone and face to face. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have been applying CA to analyze online talk. To better understand this methodological approach, we analyzed 89 journal articles that reported using CA to analyze CMC data. We noted which disciplines published such work, the kinds of CMC being studied, size of the corpus being analyzed, what topics were being explored, and the conversational features being noted in the data. We will share the ways in which CA might be best used to understand CMC, including ways in which such methods must be reconfigured to answer new questions CMC presents.