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Hi Katerina,<br>
<br>
I did a thing like that semi-manual. A bit boring maybe, but not
impossible and I am definitely not a programmer.<br>
Just like Nancy did, I used one text file. I made it so that every
message was on a single line, with the AUTHOR (or so) tag in front. <br>
I deleted everything that was not the author tag, and transferred the
result of this to MS Excel.<br>
In Excel I sorted, and then did some counting. I even computed a Lorenz
Curve.<br>
<br>
If you want to know more about how I did this, I can send you the
Excel-file. <br>
It takes some hours work to figure it all out (which I have done for
you now ;-) ), but once you have done that, you can easily apply it to
all the discussions you want. <br>
<br>
Kind regards,<br>
<br>
Carlo Hagemann<br>
<br>
Katerina wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid001d01c3b8ea$e2e3bde0$32ef263e@KATERINA">
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<p class="MsoBodyText3" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;" align="justify"><span
lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Verdana;"><font
face="Verdana" size="2">As part of my study of an online community I
have to measure the participation rates among participants, in a way
similar to Nancy Baym's in her classic study of the r.a.t.s online
community. From my participation and observation of this particular
community so far, it is obvious to me that most of the messages are
contributed by a small group of heavy users. However, I need to
quantify it, measure it and present it as a table containing
percentages of posters and posts contributed. My question is how can I
do it? What is the method of measuring these rates? Does it simply
consist in noting down how many messages each member writes? Prima
facie that may look like an easy procedure but once starting to do it
it turns out to be extremely difficult since this online community is
made up of more than 20 conferences each one comprising more than 50
different topical discussions. Overall the number of messages written
every week is enormous. Any ideas on how I can measure overall
participatio rates of such an environment? </font></span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText3" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;" align="justify"><span
lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Verdana;"><font
face="Verdana" size="2">Thank you, </font></span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText3" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;" align="justify"><span
lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Verdana;"><font
face="Verdana" size="2">K. Diamantaki </font></span></p>
</blockquote>
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