Dialogue OC4 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: No one is surprised to hear that dialogues between particular participants are affected by previous dialogues between those participants. Yet our formal frameworks do not reflect this. Dialogue in general is resumptive.

In this example, in the first dialogue the user wants some relief from an over-busy condition of the shared computer. (High "load average" refers to this condition.) Operator believes that he can fix it. In the second dialogue, the problem has not disappeared, and a different explanation ensues, involving a condition that Operator cannot control.

The dialogue also illustrates, in turn 14, how one can refuse termination of a game, pursue the game and then accept termination of the game, along with media management, in a single turn.

Symbol	PDF file	Transcript, Symbolic and Graphic Analysis in Spreadsheet for download and manipulation
OC4	Click for pdf.	Click for spreadsheet.

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