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Conversational Analysis of Chat Room Talk PHD thesis by Dr. Terrell Neuage  University of South Australia National Library of Australia.  THESIS COMPLETE .pdf  / or

THESIShome ~ Abstract.html/pdf ~ Glossary.html/pdf ~  Introduction.html/pdf  ~ methodology.html/pdf  ~ literature review.html/pdf ~  Case Study 1.html/pdf~ 2.html/pdf~ 3.html/pdf~  4.html/pdf~ 5.html/pdf~  6.html/pdf~  7.html/pdf~ discussion.html/pdf  ~ conclusion.html~ postscipt.html/pdf~ O*D*A*M.html/pdf~ Bibliography.html/pdf~  911~ thesis-complete.htm/~ Terrell Neuage Home Appendixes  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.  DATA ~ Case Study   1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 ~ 6 ~ 7 ~ These links are from early notes and not the final edits which are in the published version available at the University of South Australia only. Not all links are active due to changing domains. Home page see http://neuage.co

Acknowledgements

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Wednesday, 5 June 2002 4:10 PM

 

6. Discussion

Another question addressed in chapter 6, the discussion section in this study asks whether we are all "eavesdropping" and taking a voyeuristic look into other’s conversations? Governments, especially the United States Government since September 11, 2001, has developed sensitive listening and recording devices to track all online communication[1]. 

Chatrooms have limitations, that conversations in which physical speech is produced do not have. Talk in chatroom is limited to short phrases.  Rarely will there be more than several words written at a time by a 'speaker'.  Looking at a sampling of a dozen chatrooms and hundreds of entrances, I found that there was an average of 7.08 words per turn.  Within that sampling, 25 percent of words consisted of two letters, and 20 percent consisted of three letter words.  Eighty-three percent of words used in chatroom conversations were five letters or less.  The way we communicate will change and is now changing.  As we are faced with more choices and more to do all the time, communication will become more concise, or the speaker will be left behind.

 

1.3 Research Questions

My approach to examining online chatrooms begins with the posing of the following five questions[2] as a starting point toward analyzing a culture of electronic-talk:

1. Is turn taking negotiated within chatrooms?

2. With the taking away of many identifying cues of participants (gender, nationality, age etc.) are issues of sexism and political correctness, as prevalent, as in face-to-face talk?

3. How is electronic chat reflective of current social discourse?       

4. Is meaning contractible within Chatrooms?

5. Will chatrooms (as part of an online discourse) become a universally understood language?

 

A question that I explore throughout this thesis is “Are non-moderated chatrooms the closest to casual conversation?”

 

whether we are all "eavesdropping" and taking a voyeuristic look into other’s conversations? Above two from Introduction – public or private

1.1 Features of Chatroom

1.  

 

1.                  Fleeting text

2.                  Author as reader, reader as author

3.                  Misleading titles of chatrooms

4.                  Multiple-Authorship in different chatrooms

5.                  Semiotic representation such as Avatars and Emoticons

6.                  Threads of conversation

7.                  Discontinuity, i.e. popup ads or ads amongst the turn-takings

8.                  Chatroom graffiti

9.                  Lurking

10.             Collaborated-Selves

1.                  Spelling, Abbreviations and Grammatical errors

2.                  Long gaps between asking and answering in turn takings with other turn-takings in between

3.                  Metaphysical-chat-linguistics; anticipating discourse

4.                  Repeated utterances with little or no content i.e ‘hello’, ‘anyone want to chat’

5.                  Keyboard writing not showing emotions of hand-written correspondence

6.                  Non-existent author, such as a bot (robot)

 

This is all the stuff you will ‘discover’ from your research…isn’t it…otherwise what will you say later on , in your discussion of the results. Your results will show that these things are true.

For example, there is the feature of the fleeting text. What is written is seldom ‘captured’ for future reference. Whereas other literary genres such as a thesis, stories, poetry, emails and letter writing are preserved, discussed and subjects of future writings, chat dialogue is seemingly chaotic and disappears when the chatroom is logged off of or the chat-server crashes or the computer is turned off.

Few chatrooms preserve chat logs of what is said in the chatroom which can be viewed at a later time[3]. However, most chat rooms are written in java script and appear in an applet[4] which disappears once the chat room is logged off of. Chatters know that their text may be lost forever, yet ideas, prose, experiments of identity and statements are written that in other writing genres would be saved and elaborated on.

Other features peculiar to online communication, especially emoticons, give chat writing a different quality than any other writing format. Abbreviations and miss spelt words are common to all online writing including email, discussion groups, and chatrooms and are accepted as proper online discourse protocol. In chatrooms the combination of emoticons, spellings and abbreviations create a writing language that makes chat writing a unique language.

Text-based chatrooms differ from TV or radio “chat shows” in several ways.  Apart from the obvious physical voice giving a ‘hue’ to the speaker, the amount of dialogue which can be conveyed at any time in a chatroom is limited, primarily due to the amount of words which can be typed in a chatroom at one time.  This ‘speaking’ within a chatroom can be very much limited to the ability of the participant to be able to type quickly. A person able to type 120 words per minute will be able to convey much more in a short time than a person typing with one finger is able to perform.[5]  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 can be ‘spoken’ by each individual.  Another major difference in most chatrooms where there is no moderator, is the lack of focus on a topic[6]. In radio and television chats there is a moderator who keeps control, in unmoderated chatrooms it is, however, up to the other participants in the chatroom, if they wish to, to control the topics.

Another behaviour that would be difficult, if not impossible, to know whether it is being done online is that a chatroom participant could easily insert pre-typed text. However, we can assume that if the same chunks of text repeatedly appeared that it was done through cutting and pasting the text. 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 Case Study 3, 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. This presents the unusual situation of people carrying on a conversation with a non-existent person or a bot (computer generated robot).

 

I have found in my research that in a chatroom, from examining many thousands of lines of chat, that an average of five items, including words, emoticons or abbreviations are taken for each turn.