Viewpoints in Miners Representations of Risk

Unlike two-dimensional or flat representations in a written text or illustration, mine space is dynamic, uncertain, and multi-dimensional. Miners must orient themselves and their equipment in relationship to other miners working in the same section. As miners advance the face, they must move machines and equipment forward. As they cut coal, they change the dimensions of their environment. As they remove coal from the mine haulageways, rock strata shift in response to the changing forces, producing roof falls and eruptions. To prevent roof falls, miners must install temporary supports and, later, permanent roof supports. 

When miners work underground, they lose their ordinary sense of space and time. They must understand their position in relation to the coal face and in relationship to the three-dimensional patterns of rooms, haulageways, cross-cuts, and exit ways beneath the surface of the mine. They must orient themselves inby (inside oO and outby (outside oO the coal face so that they can describe their positions to others and know the means of escape in an emergency.-  

When miners describe their experiences, they depict themselves as characters within these spaces. As they speak, their concentrated focus suggests that speech and gesture work together to produce a highly emotional and intense memory of their work. Sometimes, experts also assume the viewpoint of another character in their narrative. These mimetic gestures suggest that they can put themselves in the place of an Other because they can imagine themselves as Other in the spaces in which they work. Even when miners represent themselves, however, this Self represents another past self, located in another historical space, hut vividly present in the miners narratives. 

When speakers employ mimetic viewpoints, they reenact their embodied memories of risk. They also reenact their sensory and physical memory of the spaces, social relationships, and institutional relationships they encountered as they worked. As the following discussion suggests, their gestures depict more than the mere physical dimensions of objects and spaces in their environment. 

Expert miners use mimetic gestures to depict these harrowing experiences. In the following example, E3 uses mimetic gestures to describe the difficulties he experienced the first time he operated a roof-bolting machine. Because he is small (less than five feet three inches tall), E3 must struggle to control the 

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APPENDIX A CHARACTERIZING VIEWPOINTS IN MINERS REPRESENTATIONS OF RISK... 

Within the Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large Regulatory Industries, rhetorical choices can be strategic or habitual. As we have shown in previous chapters, interviewers can prompt miners to assume new viewpoints. Agencies can use these techniques to create the rhetorical conditions that evoke elaboration, demonstration, and redefinition. They can use gesture to explore, query, and co-construct a more adequate representation of risk. 

It is not possible within the framework of this analysis to determine which features of the representation are self-conscious and which reflect deeper patterns of thought and habitual action (Cf. McNeill and Duncan, 2000). These representations do not reveal Libby s thoughts at the moment of risk decision making. They are not demonstrations in the conventional sense, though they demonstrate what an experienced miner s representation might look like. These gestures demonstrate how an experienced miner can assume alternative viewpoints strategically to help her think about her work. 

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