The John Heritage Everyday Talk Archive (JHETA) was established in 2018 by graduate students in UCLA’s Department of Sociology in honor of John Heritage’s contribution to the academic community. A Distinguished Professor and admired mentor, his legacy of scholarship and methodological expertise have advanced the study of language and social interaction and played a defining role in the field of conversation analysis. This repository is inspired by one of Dr. Heritage’s longstanding wishes: to provide resources for scholars to access and share diverse, contemporary audiovisual data for the study of everyday talk.

The mission of the Archive is to foster the scientific study of social interaction by providing UCLA graduate students shared access to a diverse dataset of naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction across a range of populations and settings. The Archive operates under a unified IRB protocol, allowing students to collect, share, and access audio and video data as members of a cooperative endeavor. As such, the Archive will continue to expand in perpetuity, maintained by and accessible to all UCLA graduate students interested in the study of social interaction.

The express aim of the John Heritage Everyday Talk Archive is to stimulate graduate student research, to enhance students’ analytical skills, and to encourage both inter- and intradisciplinary collaboration among current students, as well as future generations who, like us, owe a great debt to the intellectual force of our professor, mentor, and friend, John Heritage.

UCLA graduate students who wish to become members of the archive may do so by contacting JHETA’s current student Chair.