The language of chatgroups 137
explicitly refer to previous messages), that members of their con-
ference read on average only between five and seven other postings
before sending their own.^16
With arbitrary entrance-points, and an ongoing accumulation
oftopics,theadequateindexingofthemessagesinanasynchronous
chatgroup is critical. Attention needs to be paid to both coverage
(the range of subject-matter indexed) and treatment (how the in-
dexed information is presented). A traditional alphabeticalindex
of the group content will be only partly informative – it will be
useful for contributors’ names, for example – but topical content
needs a thematic approach, so that subsets of semantically related
messages (threads) can be identified. Readers (as the student con-
ference example illustrates) need to be provided with a thematic
‘map’ of the message-structure of a group, when they access it.
In the students’ case, their data was processed using the confer-
ence management program, VAXNotes (VAX=‘Virtual Address
eXtension’ minicomputer), with each message assigned an ID, date,
topic title, and file-number; for instance, item 3.16 would be the
16th reaction to topic 3. The required approach has been called
topographic– ‘a writing with places, spatially realized topics’.^17 And
the controlling semantic notion is the title assigned to the message
topic. Titles, as Davis and Brewer put it, enable us to ‘read the “map”
of the conference as if we lived in the territory’; they give us a guide
to the ‘conference topography’.^18 They are in many ways analogous
to the ‘subjects’ of e-mail, and operate under similar constraints
(p. 98). If they are too vague they are useless. If they are altered, it
becomes difficult to trace message themes.
Title threads grow in number as the theme of the conference
broadens. If I decide to set up a group called ‘Influence of hamsters
(^16) Davis and Brewer (1997: 131). It is by no means clear whether this is due to practical
reasons (e.g. time availability) or psycholinguistic reasons (e.g. the amount of ‘semantic
distance’ required before someone loses the thread of a discourse). I am reminded of the
17 magic number seven, plus or minus two (Miller, 1969).
18 Bolter (1991: 25).
Davis and Brewer (1997: 54–5). Especially when the time-frames are extensive, there is an
urgent need for some sort of co-ordination mechanism to flag new relevant documents,
to stop one user’s updates interfering with others: see Adams, Toomey, and Churchill
(1999).