ABSTRACT

In chapters 3 and 4 I will explore the published textual biographies of selected members of the Herbarium and the ELI. (As the reader will recollect, by the middle 1990s no people with such scholarly careers remained in the Computing Resource Site, the active researchers having migrated to other computer science units elsewhere on campus.) However, in this chapter the focus is on the quotidian discourse-related activities that occur and recur on the three floors of the building. As previously mentioned, I have been selective here, choosing certain more or less regular processes that seem emblematic of the way things generally get done on each floor. These are "the defined rhythms of work" (Charles Tamason, personal communication, 1996) that orchestrate the roles of text and task and are, in tum, orchestrated by them. I take the CRS first, where attention focuses on a climate of change, and on the roles of the consultants as purveyors of technical advice and customer help. Then comes the Herbarium and its storage, its maintenance and, particularly, its loans of vascular plant specimens to other institutions. Finally, there is the ELI, where the regular activity chosen for study is situated in the institute's Testing and Certification Division, and concerns the co-operative scrambles of the research associates and assistants therein to prepare new forms of two or three international ESL tests every year.