Contributions from different research fields (such as law, medicine, sociology, linguistics, and education) have focussed on some central aspects of "interactive procedures of knowledge generation", all of them grounded in ethnographic data from a variety of work places. The thesis about the unobservability of individual knowledge and its methodological consequences-concentration of the methods which allow participants to constitute categories such as shared knowledge, common ground and mutual understanding-has widely been discussed. Local processes of generation have been observed and systematized in interactions in classrooms or Internet forums, between doctors and patients, or during legal affairs. The long term constitution of a specific case has been studied in the context of clinical psychiatry and courts of justice. One of the central purposes of the contributions has been mediation (semiotic systems as resources and necessity for action) and multimedia supported communication.
