Dialogue OC30 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: The analysis diagram of this dialogue raises questions about strict nesting of games. It appears in turns 6 to 10 that games are not nested, and similarly in turn 13 where 5 games are involved in a single turn. None of these, and in fact none of the analysis diagrams on this site, exhibit violations of strict nesting. The appearance otherwise is an artifact of the graphical notation.

Taking turn 13 as an example, it begins by dismissing CS1, AS1 and AS2, which were all bid for termination in the previous turn. Then participation in IS4 is accepted and terminated, and IS5 is bid. The appearance comes from graphically annotating acceptance of termination on the turn where rejection is possible, which is one after the turn in which the game is most commonly dismissed, when termination is bid.

The dialogue is unusual also in suddenly moving, in turn 13, from technical help interaction to an attempt to develop a remembered social interaction. The unidentified person, Operator, becomes an identified one, who is then remembered --- misremembered as it turns out. The significance of turns 14 through 20 seems entirely social.

Symbol	PDF file	Transcript, Symbolic and Graphic Analysis in Spreadsheet for download and manipulation
OC30	Click for pdf.	Click for spreadsheet.

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