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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Volume 4 Issue 4     June, 1999

Introduction to the Special Issue on Persistent Conversation Thomas Erickson IBM T. J. Watson Research Center Interactional Coherence in CMC Susan Herring Program in Linguistics University of Texas at Arlington Text-only CMC has been claimed to be interactionally incoherent due to limitations imposed by messaging systems on turn-taking and reference, yet its popularity continues to grow. In an attempt to resolve this apparent paradox, this study evaluates the coherence of computer-mediated interaction by surveying research on cross-turn coherence. The results reveal a high degree of disrupted adjacency, overlapping exchanges, and topic decay. Two explanations are proposed to account for the popularity of CMC despite its relative incoherence: the ability of users to adapt to the medium, and the advantages of loosened coherence for heightened interactivity and language play. Visualizing Conversation Judith Donath,Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda Viégas MIT Media Lab Massachusetts Institute of Technology Although the archive of text generated by a persistent conversation (i.e. newsgroup, mailing list, recorded chat, etc.) is searchable, it is not very expressive of the underlying social patterns. In this paper we will discuss the design of graphical interfaces that reveal the social structure of the conversation by visualizing patterns such as bursts of activity, the arrival of new members, or the evolution of conversational topics. Our focus is on two projects: Chat Circles, a graphical interface for synchronous conversation and Loom, a visualization of threaded discussion. Through these examples we will explore key issues in the generation, design and use of graphical interfaces for persistent conversations. Distributed Research Teams: Meeting Asynchronously in Virtual Space Lia Adams, Lori Toomey, and Elizabeth Churchill FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. As computer networks improve, more social and work interactions are carried out "virtually" by geographically separated group members. In this paper we discuss the design of a tool, PAVE, to support remote work interactions among colleagues in different time zones. PAVE extends a 2D graphical MOO and supports synchronous and asynchronous interactions. PAVE logs and indexes activities in the space. This capture facility enables playback and augmentation of meeting interactions by non-collocated group members. Thus, members can participate asynchronously in meetings they could not attend in real time, not just review them. I Get By With A Little Help From My Cyber-Friends: Sharing Stories of Good and Bad Times on the Web Mary Beth Rosson Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech University Although the use of the World Wide Web has expanded tremendously in the past few years, we still know very little about how users are working with this new medium, what they attempt to accomplish, what works, what doesn’t. One way to answer such questions is to simply ask users for descriptions of their own activities. This paper presents an analysis of 133 stories of Web use contributed by users over a period of 40 months, since the Web Storybase began operation in December 1994. Usage of the Storybase is examined in general, and the stories are analyzed along several dimensions. The stories convey usage experiences that not only involve global information retrieval and person-to-person contact, but also the development of both good and bad interpersonal relationships, as well as extensive reflection on how the Web is changing our lives. Conversation as Publishing: the Role of News Forums on the Web Ann Light and Yvonne Rogers School of Cognitive and Computer Science University of Sussex The development of the World Wide Web (Web) has allowed publishers to move away from traditional newspaper models of news presentation to introduce more flexible products that offer both an information source and more scope for interaction with and between users. The opportunity to involve users more in the creation of news content has been exploited in various ways: for instance as discussion forums or as visitor responses to particular questions. This paper reports on an experiment investigating one form of this new kind of interaction, drawing on data from an e-mail questionnaire sent to visitors to The Guardian newspaper’s Election 97 website who observed or participated in a series of themed discussion forums in the run up to the 1997 British general election. We present an evaluation of the visitors’ behavior in the forums, their motivation and their perceptions of the discussion space. We discuss the findings in relation to the underlying model of the website, pointing out how, despite the flexbility offered by this new mode of interaction, the traditional publisher-contributor relationship remains preferable to both users and developers. Collaborative Discourse Structures in Computer Mediated Group Communications Murray Turoff* Starr Roxanne Hiltz* Michael Bieber* Jerry Fjermestad** Ajaz Rana* +Department of Computer and Information Science **School of Management New Jersey Institute of Technology Using application oriented conceptual maps to categorize the group discussion would be an advancement in the design of CMC systems to allow much larger groups to collaborate productively. The group meta communication process should allow the group to modify and evolve these conceptual discourse templates. The Virtual Speech Community: Social Network and Language Variation on IRC John Paolillo Program in Linguistics University of Texas at Arlington Many scholars anticipate that online interaction will have a long-term effect on the evolution of language, but little linguistic research yet addresses this question directly. In sociolinguistics, social network relations are recognized as the principal vehicle of language change. In this paper, I develop a social network approach to online language variation and change through qualitative and quantitative analysis of logfiles of Internet Relay Chat interaction. The analysis reveals a highly structured relationship between participants’ social positions on a channel and the linguistic variants they use. The emerging sociolinguistic relationship is more complex than what is predicted by current sociolinguistic theory for offline interaction, suggesting that sociolinguistic investigation of online interaction, where more detailed and fine-grained information about social contacts can be obtained, may offer unique contributions to the study of language variation and change.