Dialogue OC117 of the Operator's Console Corpus

This page gives access to the DMT analysis of one of the dialogues of the Operator's Console Corpus. These dialogues have a rare combination of attributes that make them extremely suitable as research data. Click on items to view the analysis.

Situation: These dialogues occured in a self-recording medium, a computer operator's printing control console. Read details of how they were collected in OC Corpus.

Participants: The participants in every case were a computer Operator and a computer network user, interacting, often very naively, during the early days of what was later called the Internet. The Operator could see the user's name at the beginning of the dialogue, but very frew of the users were personally known to the Operators. The user saw only the identifier Operator.

Features of this dialogue: This very short dialogue shows how goals, macrogames and reference can interact. The user says "THROW IT AWAY BUT CAN I GET IT TO GO TO A FILE? " This has the appearance of an odd conjoined sentence containing an imperative clause and an interrogative. The larger puzzle is what "IT" refers to. And can I get it to go to a file after Operator has thrown it away?

Another use of "IT" must be distinguished from these ("HOW DO I GET RUNOFF TO WORK, I KEEP XEQTN (executing) IT BUT IT JUST GRABS MY INPUT FILE AND THEN SAYS DONE BUT GIVES ME NO OUTPUT? ") Without saying how, it seems that using the user's goals might be helpful in sorting IT out. The key distinctions are in task goals, but they are reflected in the interaction goals of the two uses of Information Seeking.

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OC117	Click for pdf.	Click for spreadsheet.

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