[Air-l] Abstract: Measure of Discussion Activity in Threaded Discussion Spaces

[David Wiley]

I've been lurking on this list long enough, I suppose. David Wiley,
Dept. of Instructional Technology, Utah State University. How do you do?

This paper in progress describes a manner of calculating a measure of
discussion activity (*not* quality) in threaded discussion spaces. Based
on an operationalization of discussion activity in which deeper reply
levels suggest more intense discussion activity, a primitive formula for
calculating mean reply depths for discussion archives is presented,
together with methods for adjusting the measure to account for
misthreaded messages and non-discussive messages in the archive. Sample
calculations are shown and discussed for six month archives of two
mailing lists relating to open source software.

http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/discussion08.pdf

I would love to receive any comments anyone has on this work, especially
pointers to related work. I would also be happy to share the software we
used if people are interested. It currently runs the calculation on
Mailman mailing list archives (and, incidentally, converts these
archives into either edge lists or adjacency matrices for other kinds of
analysis), though we're expanding it to handle webboards like Slashdot
and kuro5hin. Theoretically it could be extended to process any archive
with a consistent presentation format, as long as you aren't afraid of
regular expressions <g>.

Anyway, pleased to meet you. Here's to more AoIR fun,

David