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As part of Erving Goffman's Centennial celebrations, this paper looks at his work pioneering the sociology of information. Goffman developed a theory of information sui generis, that was independent from extant studies of information. Goffman's considerations of information suffuse his writings. These are systematic in that they develop and advance throughout his work. However, his contributions to the study of information are only just beginning to be recognized. Prevailing views of Goffman's work have obscured appreciation of his systematic treatment of information. Goffman was pursuing information as a topic at the same time as Harold Garfinkel. Information – and the systematic study of information – are highlighted as criteria for establishing continuities and discontinuities between Goffman and Garfinkel.

This article discusses the `Ethno-inquiries', founded by Edward Rose, and the analytic affinities with Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks established in the formative development of Ethnomethodology. The article introduces the Ethno-inquiries approach to sociological interviews. Using a project that captured ordinary, oral accounts of the 1996 bombing of Manchester, England, this article shows how the epistemological and methodological attitude of the Ethno-inquiries towards talk — recognizing the linguistic constitution of the social world, avoiding methodological irony, letting informants rather than analysts organize topics — affords fine-grained analyses of ordinary actions within extraordinary events. This article discusses important aspects of interviewing including data gathering and the nature of `interview data', the selection of interviewees and getting the story. A series of vignettes demonstrates the enabling potential of this analytic attitude towards people's accounts.

This case study reports on nested projects within a larger interdisciplinary project, utilizing linguistics and sociology, arising from a corpus of conversational data. Projects were data-generated, that is, what happened between participants dictated the research questions. The data are recordings of parent–child interaction, and our viewings/hearings of these recordings. In one project, a recording device was given to the father, an English speaker, who recorded a number of conversations with his bilingual son over an 18-month period. Researchers were not present during conversations. Recordings were transcribed according to the orthographic system developed by Gail Jefferson and analyzed using the research approach Conversation Analysis. Certain changes in the "systematics" of talk were observable over time due to the longitudinal aspect of recording the same participants over time, from when the child was 3 years old to when he was nearly 5. One of the lessons from this case is how little data are required from which to generate material for analysis. These "small" data contain a multitude of interactional phenomena for explication.

Leaving the field gathers various accounts of ethnographers leaving their field sites. In doing so, the book offers original insights into an often-overlooked aspect of the research process; the ethnographic exit. The chapters variously consider situations in which the researcher must extricate themselves from field relations, deal with unexpected or imperfect ends to projects, or manage situations in which 'the field' becomes hard to leave. Whilst the chapters are firmly focussed on ethnographic exits, they also provide more general methodological insights into the conduct of fieldwork and the writing of ethnography, as well as questioning established notions of 'the field' as a bounded setting the researcher straightforwardly visits and then leaves. The book highlights the importance of recognising ethnographic exits as an essential part of the research process