[8.1.5]

The Investigation of Community Cataloguing Practices (CCP). Ethnosemantic investigations of community cataloguing practices revolve around the theme of what units of description are being used in the community under investigation. In the behavioristic methodology this issue is not made part of the objective parameter of the study; that is, the experimenter decides ahead of time what reporting units are to be kept track of. This is accomplished through instrumentation, either mechanical or verbal, i.e. through framed questions or stimulus presentations. Thus, the subject must react in terms of the categories of the experimenter or surveyor. This methodology is of course unusable in the investigation of personal experience - not because that is "subjective,' i. e. untractable -but because the experimenter's or surveyor's categories are drawn from a different register, one that is appropriate for the setting from which it evolved, namely the experimental literature on subjects. On the other hand, the natural categories people use to describe experience are drawn from the register of the daily round. We shall show -what these differences are. For now, let it be noted here that the common view among behaviorists that experiential categories are untractable because of personal subjectivity, is a mistaken view: we shall show that the personally subjective is a community affair no less than the interpersonally objective. What the behaviorist has missed so far is an opportunity to make use of techniques for investigating the standardized nature of attentional activity (see Garfinkel, 1967; Sudnow, 1972; Cicourel, 1974).

Behavioral investigations of attentional activity have been quite revealing. For instance, it is known that the attentional capacity on the daily round is less than 10 (see Miller, 1956). However, it is not known how the individual marks the various bits of information that one can demonstrate he notices. Three possibilities exist:

(a) the individual reacts to what he notices, then suddenly forgets it. This goes on all the time as may be ascertained by attempting to list everything one noticed in a span of say five minutes: noticings in the environment; sounds; thoughts; sensations; feelings; reactions; body posture adjustments; etc. We may refer to the totality of one's reactivity in a natural setting as sudden memory. Thus only a minute fraction of our sudden memory is available for description or reporting;

(b) special routines may be practiced and acquired by the organism which allow it to selectively attend and recall for brief periods of time features of the environment or of experience. For example, pilots and drivers notice dial indications on their instrument panel and are able to tell, their speed, direction, location at any given moment. When the driver, for instance, glances at his speedometer to make sure he doesn't go over a certain limit, he notices the speed then adjusts for it, up or down on the foot pedal. To do this, he must be, able to retain for a second or longer what his speed is, whether it is above or below the intended limit. However, he does not remember these noticings and adjustments to them a few seconds later; hence, we can call this kind of coding behavior short-term memory, following others in the literature.

(c) finally, as we know, we have available routine procedures for committing to long-term memory an indefinitely large corpus of interrelated information bits using pre-established labels for them.

A methodology is needed to allow the investigation of what are the categories of memory on the daily round. The categories of memory are systems of' classifying information for the purpose of coding. In ethnosemantics, a departing premise is that all social activity is an operant whose behavioral features (i.e., form or structure) are invariably standardized, i.e., under some situational control or occasionability (function). Thus, in a functional analysis, the categories of sudden memory are accountable in terms of community practices. This can easily be demonstrated by asking someone unexpected questions about what they are noticing: e.g., "Have you noticed what you've just touched with the index finger of the right hand?" or "Did you see whether it was a man or a woman that was standing by the door of the house we just drove by?" or "What were you thinking of as I tapped you on the shoulder?" etc. This kind of interrogation yields very specific information, some of it verifiable, some of it not. The fact that a person readily gives such information shows that there are standards for noticing things in a situation and people in a community overlap on what types of information they readily can supply and what they cannot. These standards of awareness of situational parameters reflect community practices in keeping track of noticeables. We call these practices community cataloguing practices in recognition of the fact that what's to be kept track of situationally is commonly recognized, and therefore, function as a catalogue or inventory would function. We also use the term accounting practice (used in the literature on ethnomethodology see Index).

Thus, the investigation of CCPs consists in the identification of the functional units of keeping track of information in a particular community. We present below some illustrations involving the units of reporting experiences and activities on the daily round.

The first example involves the units of reporting sequences of activities by reference to the D. R. time schedule. We title this zone of social existence "I. Logging Activities in Setting." The following is an entry submitted by one of our students in Psychology 222 at the University of Hawaii:

(i) 9:00 am (ii) 15 min. (iii) in the cafe (iv) me (v) having a fast breakfast before class (vi) the menu for me is the usual sausage, eggs, and rice. The coffee smells good and the air around is warm and filled with the talk of people.

(i) 9:30 am (ii) 6 hrs. (iii) going to classes (iv) me (v) start my usual day of classes and studies (vi) my classes are: Am. Stud. 310, Poli. Sci. 380, and Jap. 151. 1 get through classes at about 3:30 pm.

(i) 3:45 pm (ii) 1 hr. (iii) eat dinner with friend (iv) me and friend (v) we always eat dinner together (vi) I meet her at the cafe; talk about our day at school; make remarks about the food.

Note that the entries are reported along six, dimensions of specification; these were explained and illustrated so that the person doing the reporting may attend to the specified information features of the reported activities (see Section [9. 3] in Chapter 9). As can be noted, the six categories relate to the following topic domains:

(i) the time of the day the activity takes place; the 24-hr. cycle is the major organizing parameter of the daily round in every community we've lived in;

(ii) the length of time things take: this value is given by subtracting the time at the end from the time at the beginning; there are definite standards for how long things should take in every community we've lived in; in literate technological societies this figure is made to count for the definition of efficiency, intelligence, aptitude, personality trait, experience, and others (see CHART R/27 in Chapter 10);

(iii) physical location of self as mapped in standard units used in the community; e. g., children are taught their nationality, in terms of country and geographic location; normal people are expected to keep track of the city and address', location as they move around, from place to place on their daily schedule; finally, people keep track as a matter of routime of their physical location inside a house, building, apartment, or room (tee CHART R/1 in Chapter 10);

(iv) physical location of others, in and out of view; all communities we've studied, including bird cages at home, provide easy documentation of the fact that members are aware and keep track of the physical location of other organisms in the community (see Section [3. 5], in Chapter 3);

(v) title of the episode within which the events occurred; events are invariably reported in dramatized sequences that form a unit of episode [having a fast breakfast before class]; [start my usual day of classes and studies]; [we always eat dinner together]; note that titling the episode is an act of referring referring acts are operants in the form of labels, expressions, nominal compound predications, etc.; titling the episode functions as the delimitation or frame or context (see TITLING, in Index);

(vi) elaborations within the framed context through further acts of referring; these elaborations are also sequences of titling acts using pre-established nominals; differences in titling between category (v) and (vi) are crucial and will be discussed presently (see PMNS, in Index).

Consider now the all important issue of personal variation within standardized community practices. A question our students often have to deal with is the problem of resolving the uniqueness of particular events as against the background frame of standardized environments. This issue applies to both behavioral and mind parameters. In the case of behavior, it is clear that an individual's behavior moment by moment creates a unique and irreproducible sequence; nevertheless, our categories of keeping track of things are standardized and conventionalized and repeated by masses of others. In the case of ethnosemantics, unique and particular perspectives are referrable through standardized practices in referring to experience. Referring acts are operants that are indicative of community practices in keeping track of things. More particularly, an act of referring is accomplished through the recitation of a pre-established phrase, expression, or compound nominal that counts or functions as a title or name for it, i.e., the experience to be reported, or the experience in reportable form (see ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY in Index).

Referring acts are standard interpersonal routines that invariably occur within a situational frame or context. To study this activity, let us examine another person's entry for Logging Activities in Setting (Section [9.3.III], Chapter 9).

(i) 8:45 am (ii) 20 min. (iii) at home, in my bedroom (iv) me (v) I am lying down in bed with the covers off (vi) thinking and contemplating while listening to my clock radio

(i) 9:05 am (ii) 30 min. (iii) at home, in the kitchen (iv) me, my sister, and my father (v) I eat my breakfast and read the morning newspaper (vi) I eat a toasted tuna sandwich and while reading the paper, I ask my sister, "Do I have to pick you up today?" and she answers, "Yes, pick me up at the usual time. 11; my father reads the paper also while drinking coffee

(i) 9:35 am (ii) 5 min. (iii) at home, in the bathroom (iv) me (v) I wash up (vi) I brush my teeth with Crest, wash my face with Neutrogena soap, and then comb my hair

It may easily be noted that this second individual is using the categories of reporting that were defined. This shows that the two individuals were able to independently reproduce the dimensions of reporting deemed standard in their community. Examination of many more contributions from the same student population (see Section [8.5], Chapter 8) documents the validity or usability of these particular parameters as organizers of keeping-track in the lives of this particular student population. At the same time, one can also point to differences between them. Note for instance that person A eats breakfast alone though surrounded by people in a restaurant; person B, on the other hand, eats with two other members of the family at home. This situational contrast between cases A and B. is identified in category (iii), physical location on the community Map. Differences in category, (iii) have necessary consequences on category (iv) since, physical location of self restricts the possible collocation of others (and hence with further consequences on category (v) and (vi).

The investigation of these categorical restrictions involves the ethnography of social settings and is indicative of variability at the levels of personal,. ethnic, and standards. For example, comparisons across entries for the same person allows the cataloguing of community standards in personal variability in the use of titles to refer to experience. Thus, person A's entries for category (v) contrast with those of person B:

As can be seen from the time data shown earlier, the three entries are consecutive; this means that each of the titles used refer to chunks of the day of greatly differing sizes: 15 min., 6 hrs., and 1 hr., for the A entries, respectively, versus 20 min., 30 min., and 5 min., respectively, for the B entries. The question arises, are there restrictions to be observed in community cataloguing practices that are a function of the six categories of time of day, how long it takes, physical location, of self and others, title of episode, and details of events? (see CHARTS E/28 and R/27 in Chapter 10.) Intuitively, of course, we can say that there are such effects since what we do in the bathroom has implications for being alone in there, or again, how we eat in the morning (e. g. hurriedly) is different from how we eat in the evening (e.g. leisurely). Objectively, one can investigate this issue through contrastive analyses of categorical restrictions in situational parameters (see CHARTS R/25 and R/26 in Chapter 10).