Human communication is a dynamic, complex and reciprocal process that relies on interlocutors encoding and decoding communicative acts via multiple modalities. Advances in computational processing in the previous decades have motivated interest in the development of computational techniques and tools for aiding the analysis of conversational exchanges, many belonging to a family of techniques called Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) (Fielding & Warnes, 2009; Seale, 2010). Most CAQDAS techniques do not seek to replace the need for human judgement or interpretation, rather instead to augment human judgements (Angus, Fitzgerald, Atay, & Wiles, 2015).

In this workshop A/Prof Dan Angus will overview a number of conversation analytic frameworks, using practical examples and public data to reveal their utility for social scientific research. The talk will primarily focus on Discursis (Angus, Smith & Wiles, 2012), a software designed to assist in the analysis of inter-speaker conceptual exchange, but will also include examples from recent work on a new software framework, CalPy, designed to extract qualities from audio data (pitch, pause, intensity) for analysis and interpretation (Angus, Yu, Vrbik, Back & Wiles, 2018). This talk will be of interest to anyone interested in the study of discourse, be it social media, legacy media, interpersonal, or intergroup communication. The workshop will include live demos of these various software and also offer participants the chance to install software and run their own analyses.