Something that was not attended to very well in the last incarnation of the ROIO Chatter Archive was the overall syntax. I did not have a clear idea about how to present each of these transcripts early on and because of that, each transcript essentially inheritted its transcriber's sense of style, use of punctuation, and overall syntax. This would tend to cause confusion even with me when jumping around from one show to another.

Some examples to help you understand why this began to bother me. In one show, parentheses would be used to indicate unclear chatter while in another square brackets were used, and in yet another this was indicated with author's notes. You might wonder why that's a big deal, but consider that sometimes in a transcript you will encounter something like this:

Roger: (annoyed) ... pretty (perturbed) darn it!

It makes it difficult to separate the author's indications of the tone of voice from the unclear chatter. In the previous example, did Roger say "annoyed" or was that an author's opinion of how he said "...pretty (perturbed)"? And was (perturbed) something unclear or is that an indication of Roger's tone of voice when he says "darn it!"? (I know it's hard to imagine Roger perturbed at the audience, but try!)

Another problem: sometimes Roger Waters was referred to as "Rog", sometimes "Roger", sometimes "Waters" and sometimes "RW"--the latter version will of course cause a bit of concern in more alert readers who will wonder how I intended to differentiate RW (Roger Waters) from RW (Rick Wright).

Yet another problem that persisted to bother me was the way in which the archive was laid out previously did not allow the reader to differentiate easily between the large chunks of text that comprised audience chatter and author comments from the actual band chatter. It seemed to defeat the purpose of the archive to bury the band chatter in other text. The only apparent way to remedy this was to delete the extra text, but that too would defeat part of the purpose of the archive.

The compromise that I struck with myself was to reserve boldface type in the transcripts for any onstage chatter. This would include band members, prerecorded speech, announcers, etc. This way, you can read through the archive quickly scanning for onstage chatter and avoiding all extra commentary and audience chatter. This seems to be the best solution for now.

With this version of the archive, I'm imposing my position as editor and archiver a little more firmly and standardizing all syntax as much as I can. There will inevitably still linger a few inconsistencies, but hopefully addressing the following points of style will alleviate some confusion in reading transcripts and will make perusing the transcripts more enjoyable.

Standard Styles for the ROIO Chatter Archive

Guidelines governing the presentation of chatter transcripts.

• Every show now gets its own page in the interests of download time; two transcripts of one show will share the same page.
• All transcriber notes, comments, show details are in regular type.
• All apparent band comments are in bold.
• All prerecorded speech, onstage musicians, speech that is part of the show are bold, i.e. Jim Ladd at the KAOS shows will be bold; announcers at June 12, 1971 show will be bold.
• Unclear chatter is set inside [square brackets].
• A speaker's tone of voice is indicated in parentheses, i.e. Roger (annoyed): Shh!
• All author comments during band chatter is contained in parentheses.
• All audience chatter is in regular type.
• All songs are abbreviated.
• All band members identified by standard usage name--NO INITIALS.
• Standard usage are whole first name or whole last name or both; no nicknames, i.e. ROG or NICKY
• ALL line breaks are done with the <P> tag for better legibility.

Easy enough, I'm sure, but feel free to send me any questions or suggestions.