Conversational
Analysis of Chatroom ‘talk’
PhD thesis - Terrell Neuage at the University of South Australia this page
updated Tuesday, 7 August 2001 Adelaide
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This is too
specific: see above for a way to capture the “problem” of your research.
I.
Statement_of the problem
Research on-line is different from face to face
research. There are the obvious differences: not always being able to verify
who the writer of the text is; whether the writing has any validity to it; not
knowing if what is read is a cut-and-paste of several other’s writings. There is the problem of intent. There is often no knowledge of the original,
the beginning, and the source.
Just taking one of the problems of not doing
face-to-face research; that of intent. Writing has a long history of
questionable intent. Research based on
unknown writing is at the best of times experimental. “In the beginning was the
word and the word was with God” (John1:1).
Who wrote that? If we read it NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today how many generations of
cut-and-paste are involved. What were
the original words? What did it
mean? If we look at it from a
metaphysical perspective we could say that we are talking about sound. The fiat of the word or the movement into
creation. Can we ask ‘what was the word
that was in the beginning?’ Was the
word spoken in Yiddish, American, and French?
The point being that when we don’t know the
source and all we have is our take on something then we are left with our
translation of someone’s take on what someone else had said about what they
believed was a correct translation of an earlier writing. In other words we don’t have a clue. On-line research can have this same problem. How do we do research on-line? Obviously we do it on-line. And when the
research is on chatrooms then on-line is the only way to do research.
Another problem is the enormity of the task of
analysing chat-room ‘talk’. Where do we
go from here? I have narrowed this
topic to a very few chat rooms. The problem with a study of anything involving
technology is its shortness of relevance.
Every day I get emails of another researcher beginning to write a thesis
or paper in this field. On-line
conversation has become the trendy subject to investigate.
When I started this research in 1997 I was unable to gather any material
from anyone else doing an analysis of chat-room talk. There were several who had written thesis on the sociological
aspects of online behaviours but no one seems to have looked at
chat-communication from a linguistic view.
The most I could find on Internet dialogue at the start of my research
was from Daniel Chandler[i]
and George Paul Landow[ii]
who has written copious amounts on hypertext at Brown University.
The problem then has been the sense of flying
solely in this field. The good part of
that is I had a sense of I could make it up as I went. That thought lasted for about a minute but
it got me going. As can be seen in my
rapidly growing collection of resources on online communicate studies (http://se.unisa.edu.au/vc~essays.html)
there is a lot written on online communication. So much so that I sometimes question my thesis and whether there
is much validity with the direction I am going.
If the social science’s two roles are observation
and explanation of human behaviour then it is the chat-ethnographer’s[iii]
responsibility to explain what is going on in ‘discourse communities’[iv].
Researchers such as Robin Hamman (http://www.cybersoc.com)
a doctoral student at the University of Westminster, London currently
studying online communities takes an ethnographic approach to researching
chatrooms. An ethnographic[v]
provides a method for learning about, and learning how to talk about that
elusive process we call culture. In our
case we are talking about an Internet culture.
This concept of an Internet Culture will be explored in passing in the
conclusion/discussion of this thesis. The purpose is to gain experience in
ethnographic practices--interviewing, fieldwork, and qualitative analysis--and
to learn. It is the participant-observer in chatroom, the writer-reader of the
text who influences and is influenced by the chat milieu.
Are chatrooms public or private?
In
addition, there are questions of whether cyberculture, especially exchanges
within chatrooms, are public or private. (Cybersociology ~ http://www.cybersociology.com ~ issue
six: Research Methodology Online ~ http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/magazine/6/issue6.html)
All exchanges within chatrooms accessible to the public are public. Any
chatroom where the participator has to log on with screening criteria such as
belong to a university or government body and thus needing an identifying code
to participate is within a private chatroom and the dialogue would be
confidential if required. As well as
the behaviour of the participants, if known to one another would be different
than a chatroom which is open to the public and participators make up usernames
which does not reflect or identify themselves.
These
areas of chatroom ‘space’ where talk is differentiated by anonymity (public),
or the user is known (private) will be analysed for their grammar usage in the
thesis of chatroom linguistics. There
are also various ‘types’ of chatrooms and I will elaborate on this in another
section. Overall, there are two main
divisions of chatrooms: moderated and non-moderated. Moderated chatrooms can be
subdivided into chatrooms where people submit questions and answers are
provided. This is most common in cases
where people who are publicly known are in the chatroom, ie. sports stars,
politicians, experts on a particular topic. Moderated chatrooms are
‘controlled’ by a particular person who controls the movement of chat. For example, if there is inappropriate
language which is considered offensive to others in the chatroom the
participator infringing can be prevented from continuing in the chatroom. The
chatrooms I will investigate are the open, non-moderated chatrooms as I believe
these provide the opportunity for the flowing chat interaction I wish to
analyse. It is these chatrooms which
are closest to casual conversation.
The
emergence of the term 'chat' to describe electronic communication text forms is
one indication of its difference from existing talk modes. There is the sense
that on-line conversation is not serious and therefore may not be worthy of an
intensive linguistic study. The term, 'chat', however captures only some of the
dimensions of this emergent communication form. chatrooms differ from TV or
radio “chatshows” primarily due to the limit of words. In a chatroom, from several thousand lines
of chat, I have found there is an average of five words for each turn
taken. However, when conversation is
‘pieced’ together from ‘speakers’ a coherent conversation can be found. In other electronic chat modes such as radio
and television talk shows more words are ‘spoken’ by each individual. The other major differences is the lack of
control in most chatrooms of topic whereas in radio and television chats there
is a moderator who keeps control of the topic.
At a more functional level a particular phrase or
word can be added to an ongoing conversation with the push of the copy (usually
control-C) key on a computer. An example of this is in the ‘Talk City’ chat of
February 16, 2000. In this dialogue the ‘speaker’
B_witched_2002-guest copies in ‘OHI’ 37 times in 75 turns of ‘speech’. One-half
of the conversation is computer generated. I will further examine this in
chapter 8 when analysing this particular chat.
more on this. Every
human event is culture-bound (Nobuo: 1990: 79), yet there is the question of
whether cyberspace is even "real" and therefore worthy of study. cite studies In addition, there are questions
of whether cyberculture, especially exchanges within chatrooms, are public or
private. (Cybersociology ~ http://www.cybersociology.com ~ issue six: Research Methodology Online). ~
detail the arguments, Why does this matter?
There are many forms of electronic communication
to choose from. Therefore, identifying what area of electronic communication to
analyse on-line conversation was the first task. There is a continuing
developing array of communication forms being developed. How people 'talk' has
gone through many transformations. One of the first forms of non face-to-face
'turn-taking' communications available to most people in Western Society on a
large scale was the telephone. Computers are the next step in non face-to-face
'turn-taking' communication. You need to
distinguish between them - especially with the arrival of the Palm Pilot and
email via mobile phone.
Duranti, Alessandro.
"Ethnography of Speaking: Toward a Linguistics of the Praxis." Linguistics:
The Cambridge Survey (Language: The Socio-Cultural Context, vol.
IV). Ed. F.J. Newmeyer. Cambridge UP, 1989. 210-228.
Discusses the principles that
guide ethnographers of speech. ES studies language as it is actually used; aims
to describe communicative competence; stresses (sociocultural) context;
analyzes speech events. CA, on the other hand, doesn't rely on sociocultural
context (only on turn-taking system, which it claims is universal?).
Freed, Richard C. and Glenn J. Broadhead. "Discourse
Communities, Sacred Texts, and Institutional Norms." College
Composition and Communication 38.2 (May 1987): 154-165.
Freed and Broadhead consider
the new emphasis in composition on having students understand the
"discourse communities" -- the bodies of knowledge, conventions, and
strategies -- that they belong to. To look at the effect of a discourse
community on the writing process, they examine the corporate cultures of an
accounting firm and a consulting firm to show how their institutional outlooks
affect proposal writing. Following this analysis, Freed and Broadhead conclude
with a call for ethnographic writing to help students recognize and understand
the norms of specific cultures.
Geertz, Clifford.
"The Way We Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of Modern Thought." Local
Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1983. 147-163.
thought is multiple across
cultures-- people in different cultures think differently. How, as thinkers and
people in a culture ourselves, can we understand our own thought or that of
others? Answer: using ethnography. Discusses 3 methodological themes from
ethnography that might be relevant to understanding thought: the use of
convergent data, the formation and definition of category labels, and the
examination of the life cycle.
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Rarely do we research human
interaction without including the subjects involved. I am making the assumption
in my work that the snatches of dialogue I have captured are actually from
humans. A program could be written that would put up a selection of words every
few turns in a chatroom and not be representative of any particular person. ref. this to the TURING CHALLENGE
There are various equivalent formulations of the
Church-Turing thesis. A common one is that every effective computation can be
carried out by a Turing machine. The Church-Turing thesis is often
misunderstood, particularly in recent writing in the philosophy of mind.
Statements that there is an effective method for achieving such-and-such a
result are commonly expressed by saying that there is an effective method for
obtaining the values of such-and-such a mathematical function. For
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At a more functional level a particular phrase or
word can be added to an ongoing conversation with the push of the copy (usually
control-C) key on a computer. An example of this is in the ‘Talk City’ chat of
February 16, 2000. In this dialogue the ‘speaker’
B_witched_2002-guest copies in ‘OHI’ 37 times in 75 turns of ‘speech’. One-half
of the conversation is computer generated. I will further examine this in
chapter 8 when analysing this particular chat.
more on this .Every human event is culture-bound (Nobuo: 1990:
79), yet there is the question of whether cyberspace is even "real"
and therefore worthy of study. cite studies
In addition, there are questions of whether cyberculture, especially exchanges
within chatrooms, are public or private. (Cybersociology ~ http://www.cybersociology.com ~ issue six: Research Methodology Online). ~
detail the arguments, Why does this matter?
There are many forms of electronic communication
to choose from. Therefore, identifying what area of electronic communication to
analyse on-line conversation was the first task. There is a continuing
developing array of communication forms being developed. How people 'talk' has
gone through many transformations. One of the first forms of non face-to-face
'turn-taking' communications available to most people in Western Society on a
large scale was the telephone. Computers are the next step in non face-to-face
'turn-taking' communication. You need to
distinguish between them - especially with the arrival of the Palm Pilot and
email via mobile phone.
Next - Why examine chatroom dialogue?
Return to Case Study One, Two,
Three, Four, Five
Return to Introduction for thesis
Return to Literature Review
Return to Bibliography
...........
