I propose to make this project known to students and staff at the beginning of the first semester of 1999. As this project is too large to be accomplished solely by myself I would solicit volunteers from students and staff from the beginning. The areas, which I will be accessing for data analysis, would come from the discussion groups and chatrooms within the zine's environment.

I am currently discussing the detail of design and logistics and the monitoring process with my supervisors, Jackie Cook and Claire Woods, with the Human Subject Research Ethics committee and the Divisional Head of Research, Ed Carson.

Because this is in a university environment the chatrooms should have an academic 'feel' to them, although I do not yet know how that will manifest in terms of site design. There are already thousands of IRCs on the Internet. Hundreds cater to cybersex and relationships. For this reason I would not expect to get people who are looking for such chatrooms to visit the sites I have set up. Christopher Lloyd refers to computer networks as the "singles bars of the 1990s". In an article in The Sunday Times (UK), 28 November 1993, Lloyd reports that there are more than 7000 chatrooms on-line 24 hours a day, visited by 15 million people. That was five years ago. There is then an obvious need to establish mechanisms to elicit only focused participants into this site. This will be a primary design issue in setting up the project.

The methodology I propose to pursue for the textual analysis within this project is a mixture of several approaches to linguistics studies. As what I am proposing to do includes several fields of study, as shown below, I have to be clear at all times that what I am doing is at core a linguistic study. My approach to this study therefore, differs from that of a psychological or sociological approach. The psychological asks why we have conversation the way we do. The sociological conversation analysis asks us instead how we do the conversation. Linguists ask, "How is language structured to enable us to do conversation". (Eggins & Slade 1997, p.7) By extending this approach into electronic interactions I can retain for my study a focus on evolving practices within a sphere still loosely considered textual rather than talk-based.

My review of current literature has not found adequate print material directly on chatrooms and discussion groups to pre-dispose these formats within given theoretical positions. To establish means for rigorous analysis, I propose therefore to "export" my investigation into the established linguistic methodologies of work on discourse - and especially on conversation. There is a growing body of print material on hypertext, the Internet and the World-Wide-Web but there has been little work done on analysis of interactive on-line text, which is seemingly borderless, as it is in on-line dialogues. Even within the environment of the World-Wide-Web I have found little written work on this topic. There is some discussion in e-mails regarding discourse in this environment. (see below) There are some unpublished theses, (see end-notes) which explore chatrooms and discussion groups, but these are mainly from a sociological or psychological perspective.

I will use recent up-dated theorization by Suzanne Eggins and Diana Slade in their book Analysing Casual Conversation as a guide to analysing chatroom and discussion group differences. They write on how 'conversation consists of 'chat' and 'chunks'. The 'chat' segments are those where structure is managed 'locally', that is, turn by turn. The 'chunks' are those aspects of conversation which have a global, or macro-structure, where the structure beyond the exchange is more predictable. 'Chat' equals move by move unfolding of talk. 'Chunk' segments need an analysis which can capture the predictable macro or global structure'. (Eggins, Slade, 1997. p.230). Eggins and Slade carry on the work of the Conversational Analysis (CA) theorist Howard Sacks. Sacks's major studies into CA were in the early 1970s whilst teaching at the Linguistic Institute, University of Michigan). I will explore how Sacks's CA can detect change in the rules of engagement in chatrooms where conversation is moved from an oral environment to an on-line environment. (I will discuss a series of methods to determine who is "leading" in the conversation in the methodology section below.)

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) uses the term heteroglossia (Emerson & Holquist 1981) to describe the inscription of multiple voices engaging in dialogue within the text. Paul Taylor (1992) points out that,

Hypertext as heteroglossia, then, is the collaborative mode which avoids a totalizing movement toward consensus; heteroglossia instead validates the diversity of values and voices that are produced by the variety of individuals.

Kristeva (1941 -) builds on the works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Bakhtin to examine the speaking subject and the signifying structures of social practice. It is Kristeva's work on intertextuality which is useful in this study of Internet "conversations". Kristeva charts a three-dimensional textual space whose three "coordinates of dialogue" are the writer, the reader and the texts; she describes this textual space as intersecting planes which have horizontal and vertical axes:

My own work seeks to extend Kristeva's modeling of the layering of text, into the ever more complex and shifting systems of talk-texts. By combining her highly theorised models with the analysis of conversation and discourse linguistics, I hope to establish both a theory-rich, and methodologically complex, means of analysing contemporary electronic talk-culture.

Landow has published a substantial amount of work on hypertext, including Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art (1997), Hypertext and Critical Theory (1994), Hypertext -- Hyper/Text/Theory (1994); as well as Electronic Publications: "Context32: A Web of English Literature" (1987); "An Introduction to Intermedia, "Assignments in Hypertext" (1988); "The Dickens Web", 1990. (a hypermedia corpus containing 200 documents); as well as being involved with the hypertextual publishing company, Eastgate.

Landow speaks of the "paradigm shift" from print to electronic writing. (1992) He builds upon earlier writers: Barthes, Foucault, Bakhtin, and Derrida in his discussion of this "shift". Landow's work is in hypertext and how blocks of text are linked. As with Kristeva, I am interested in how and how far this theorisation relates to the structuring of the "talk-text" of internet chat.

I will also apply the work of Daniel Chandler to my study. Chandler teaches courses on semiotics on-line and at the University of Wales . His study of codes (textual codes and social codes) as iconic signs links well with the codes of Interactive texts within the Internet environment, and provides a means of re-contextualising my study within socio-cultural contexts.

Earlier writers important to the evolution of hypertext study are Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault, Theodor Nelson, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Barthes and Foucault were early users of terms such as link (liaison), web (toile), network (reseau) and interwoven (s'y tissent), all of which contributed to understanding of hypertextuality. (Landow, 1992. p. 8). In general I am tracing the development of moves found in what is called "active" reading, and "intertextual" or culturally-embedded text, both of which are focused in the contemporary study of Discourse.

Out of the people named above, and many more who will be included as I progress, I will concentrate particular attention from the beginning of this research on the Conversational Analysis of Howard Sacks, the dialogist, David Bohm, two researchers into intertextuality; Bakhtin and Kristeva, and the hypertextual theorists George Landow and David Bolter. I will say more of these six people and how I will use their work to investigate chatrooms and discussion groups below. A further listing of authors, which I have drawn from in the past for my original proposal for a postgraduate study on the effects of the Internet upon literature, is at

For my MA at Deakin University I compiled an extensive bibliography on theorists, whom I will also draw upon.

Methodology in cyberspace is different than in any other environment. Sherry Turkle writes, "Virtual reality poses a new methodological challenge for the researcher: what to make of on-line interviews and indeed, whether and how to use them." (Turkle, 1995, p.34), quoted by Hamman (1966). Researching within virtual communities one must embrace a multi-disciplinary approach. My own proposal however creates specific theoretical and methodological "focus points" within this multidisciplinary, and establishes a new direction for such study.

There have been few published studies of cyberspace. The ones that exist focus mainly on MUDs and hypertext. The ones which looked at chatrooms and on-line interaction focused on cybersex and relationships. I have not found any one researching on-line communication from a linguistic field.

Analyzing patterns of words and grammar in chatrooms, Instant Messenger, and within discussion group environments will present challenges not faced in other forms of textual analysis. Linguistic researcher, Michael Stubbs begins his book, Text and Corpus Analysis (1996), with a question: "How can an analysis of the patterns of words and grammar in a text contribute to an understanding of the meaning of the text?" (p.3) Stubbs continues with an explanation of text, which will be the working definition of text I will use in my own research:

My exploration of the use of such "natural" language will extend to how it is constructed within chatrooms, Instant Messenger, and within discussion groups environment. Eggins and Slade in Analysing Casual Conversation, write, "Interacting is not just a mechanical process of taking turns at producing sounds and words. Interacting is a semantic (their italics) activity, a process of making meanings".(p.6) It will be in the analysing of text on-line that I hope to find and describe a new process of meaning making in participants' conversation. The main differences I hypothesize at the start of this study are that discussion groups are not as casual as IM or chatroom conversation. In discussion groups people usually take more time and care with what they write. They may use a spell/grammar check, and think before posting their text. There is a more textual format with discussion groups. Instant Messenger and chatrooms appear at first sight to be less disciplined and more varied. But CA analysis has already showed this is not the case in casual conversation. My research suggests that there are similar, contextual forms at work in on-line chat, and that any differences my analysis can establish will be more a matter of degree than of essence.

There are positive and negative aspects of doing analytical research in cyberspace. The most difficult aspect is the inability to do follow-up work with participants in chatrooms. Unless the person is identified and their e-mail address is noted so that they can be tracked within chatrooms they become lost to the researcher.

People in cyberspace often change their name for use in other chatrooms, and sometimes within the chatroom they will change their name. For example, in an academic chatroom where there is scholarly discussion about an issue a person may log in as 'laProf'. In a sex-chatroom, the same person may be 'lovelylegs'. In a political chatroom the person may choose to be 'senator'. One's character are only part of one's on-line repertoire. A person can be a feather, fire hydrant, cloud or a river bank. How the person's 'speaking' persona changes in different chatrooms is an area I intend to explore. In the meantime, my research will foreground some of the ways in which such changes might be described and identified. Summing this up, Robin B. Hamman in his MA Dissertation (1996) writes;

The indication is clear: on-line "cyborg identity" involves deliberative production of persona via performed interactive talk-text. It is this talk-text, already deployed by thousands, which I aim to analyze.

Ethnography is defined as "the acts of both observing directly the behaviour of a social group and producing a written description thereof." (Marshall, 1994, 158). In this study I will observe, analyse and present the discourse of chatroom and discussion group cultures.

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