[1] In order not to devote a disproportionate amount of time and space here in this chapter to discussion of purely technical and implementational issues, readers interested in more detailed background information on distributed virtual environments, especially those of object-oriented type (see later) are referred to some other publications with more in-depth discussions of this particular topic, for instance: Bruckman, 1992; Bruckman & Resnick, 1993; Curtis, 1992, 1993; Coppock, 1997; Masinter & Ostrom, 1993; Reid, 1994; White, 1997. See also the TECFA MOO page; also the Virtual Reality in Education Page.
[3] See for instance Bolter 1991; Delany & Landow 1994; Landow 1992; Nielsen 1993; Nunberg 1996.
[5]Campione & Walrath (1996) define the term `object' in object-oriented programming as follows: "An object is a software bundle of variable and related methods. [...] As the name object-oriented implies, objects are the key to understanding object-oriented technology. You can look around you now and see many examples of real-world objects: your dog, your desk, your television set, your bicycle. These real world objects share two characteristics: they all have state and they all have behaviour. For example, dogs have state (name, color, breed, hungry) and dogs have behaviour (barking, fetching, and slobbering on your newly cleaned slacks). Bicycles have state (current gear, current pedal cadence, two wheels, number of gears) and behaviour (braking, accelerating, slowing down, changing gears). Software objects are modelled after real world objects in that they too, have state and behaviour. A software object maintains its state in variables and implements its behaviour with methods. [...]
Everything that the software object knows (state) and can do (behaviour) is expressed by the variables and methods within that object. [...] You can also use software objects to model abstract concepts. For example, an Event is a common object used in GUI5 window systems to represent the action of a user pressing a mouse button or a key on the keyboard."
[7]The distributed virtual environment where this particular space is located is known as Diversity University MOO, and is administered by Marist College, USA. It may be accessed via the Internet either by means of a Telnet connection (telnet to moo.du.org:8000), or by the World Wide Web. The Piazza Maggiore space above has object number #17416, and may be accessed by keying in and entering the system command @go #17416 The exits at the foot of the description function as links or gateways to `adjacent' spaces.
[8] See for instance Malinowski, 1960, Firth, 1957,1966; Halliday 1978, 1979, 1987(b), 1994.
[9] It is clear that making this type of triadic distinction is not something to be undertaken lightly without consideration of a number of quite problematic epistemological and definitional issues (see for instance Nöth 1990 (pp. 331-333) and Ducrot & Todorov 1979 (294ff; 333) for discussions of differnt kinds of notions of text, discourse and context). Since there is will not be sufficient space to go into all this here, I shall simply allow the term text stand for any kind of material structure which participates in, and at least transitorily becomes an artefact of, some human process of communication or signification. Such communication or signification processes will be referred to as discourse. Context will represent those aspects of the communication situation and language use (who is present, their verbal and non-verbal actions, relevant objects and effects of verbal and other actions), which both frame and facilitate discourse processes and those text structures actualized as a result of these processes, and which, as a result of these processes come to change themselves over time. Broadly speaking, context spans those meanings which reflect the field of social action, the tenor of social relationships and the mode of operation of the language within the situation (Halliday 1979, see also Johnston 1996)
[10] Coppock 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1996.
[13] Bruckman & Resnick 1993; Curtis 1992; Curtis & Nichols 1993
[14] Haraway 1991, 1997; Turkle 1984, 1993, 1996; Stone 1991, 1995
[17] Some distributed environments of this kind have begun to experiment with giving participants access to navigatable three-dimensional graphical representations of the virtual environment, using the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) programming language for the World Wide Web, but so far these are very elementary and static in that they do not allow for manipulation of objects within the graphical interface, so we shall not discuss these here.
[19] See for instance MOOsaico at moo.di.uminho.pt 7777
[20] For Norwegian participants this will for instance imply substituting the Norwegian letters /æ/, /å/ and /ø/ with their ascii standard equivalents /ae/, /aa/ and /oe/.
[22] Halliday 1987(a), pp. 55-82. See also Halliday 1985; 1994.
[23] This strip is from an unedited log made by the author during our on-line seminar. It has been translated by me into English from the original Norwegian for purposes of this article, but I have attempted to make orthographic errors or other kinds of linguistic idiosyncracies present in the original log also visible in the translation.
[24]All person names in the log, with the exception of my own, have been changed at the request of the participants involved.
[25] The two most basic commands for conversing and interacting in a distributed virtual environment of this kind are `say' (or merely ") and `emote' (or merely :) Entering the command "hello will result in my seeing the message: You say, "hello", which my conversational partner will simultaneously see as: PatrickC says, "hello". Similarly, entering the command line :nods will result in us both simultaneously seeing the message PatrickC nods
[26] This strip is taken from a public log of a session on integration of MOO og Web technology during an online conference on distnace education (ICDE) held in October 1994 at Diversity University MOO. See the TECFA MOO page for some links to more information on this conference with some demonstration log materials.
[27] It is possible to use the @look or @examine commands in order to look more closely at another participant object in a MOO, but all one will see then is a written description of the object if the owner of the participant object has actually written this in, as well as certain other technical information provided by the MOO system
[28]See for instance Reid 1994, Stone 1991 and Turkle 1993 who all provide several examples of this type of activity.
[31] The emote function is described in note 25
[32] The `to' command function is useful for thematic `threading' in group conversations. Once participants master the use of this command, they can address comments and utterances by other participants which are relatively far behind the present discourse.
[33] In Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, London: John Murray.
[34]See for instance Reid 1994
[39] See for instance Duranti 1997, Duranti & Goodwin 1992, Harness Goodwin 1996
[40]See Halliday 1984 for a detailed discussion of the role of complementarity relations in dialogue.
[42] I would like to thank Maurizio Gnerre for an interesting discussion at our kitchen table a few weeks ago which awakened my attention to these particular matters.
[43] This kind of delineation and its associated consequences for the analysis of conversation are the subject of a larger body of work at present in progress and will not be discussed in any more depth here (Coppock 1997) . See however also Coppock (in press) for discussion of an attempt at tacit role re-negotiation in a courtroom setting by a previously ratified participant (Italian high court judge Antonio di Pietro) on finding himself in another kind of ratified, but now lower status (defendant) position, through refusal to answer directly a yes-no question posed by a presently ratified participant, namely another high court judge.
[44] This is a slightly edited section taken from a log of a much longer conversation which the present author had in December 1995 with Ulf (Kastner), who is one of the original founders of the Diversity University MOO community where this particular conversation was logged.
[45] The two most basic commands for conversing and interacting in a distributed virtual environment of this kind are `say' (or merely ") and `emote' (or merely :) Using the conversation snippet above as an example, my entering the command line:
"one thing... I guess starting a MOO needs a lot of people and funding. I see DU is "old" (started back in '93). Do you know how it all came about?
results in my seeing the message:
You say, "one thing... I guess starting a MOO needs a lot of people and funding. I see DU is "old" (started back in '93). Do you know how it all came about?"
which my conversational partner, who in this case is Ulf, would simultaneously see as
PatrickC says, "one thing... I guess starting a MOO needs a lot of people and funding. I see DU is "old" (started back in '93). Do you know how it all came about?"
Similarly, my entering the command line:
:nods
results in us both simultaneously seeing the message:
PatrickC nods
[46] This log is taken from a meeting I had in the Fall of 1995 with a group of eight female students in Norway while I was in Italy. The general theme was, as should be clear from a reading of the log, perceptions of gender and gender roles in MOO convesrations.
[47]The paging function (page <user> <message>) is generally invoked when one wishes to talk to a person in another area of the MOO from oneself. Normally pages will only be seen by the sender and receiver. The whispering function (whisper "<message>" to <user>) is invoked when one wishes to talk to someone in the same room without any other participants seeing it.
[48]bjornb was one of my students on a course on hypermedia in the humanities held at the Faculty of Arts at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in the Fall semester of 1996, with whom I tried out some cooperative building work in a MOO named Karelia run by a friend of ours at the University of Petrozavodsk in Russia while he was in Norway and I was in Italy,
[49] Diversity University MOO has its home page at http://www.du.org/