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CHAPTER 6. ANALYZING THE TALK.ABORTION NEWSGROUP 88
a lower spread value. As can be seen from Table 6.3, the median spread of the
very frequent author is 363 days, essentially the entire year. It is only slightly
less for the frequent authors, and drops considerably for the occasional and infrequent
authors. However, even among the infrequent authors, the median spread is
still greater than 120 days, or about 4 months time. This indicates a considerable
breadth of participation, as measured by time, among all of the most frequently
contributing authors.
Third, the number of different days on which authors contributed messages can be
analyzed. With this measure, ten days spread over six months is not differentiated
from ten days spread over two weeks. Thus, the number of days is an indicator
of intensity of commitment. Days, by definition, is equal to or less than spread
and messages (an author could not have contributed 10 messages on 11 different
days). When examining days, much more dramatic differences between the very
frequent authors and the other types of authors emerge. The median number of
days on which very frequent authors wrote messages was more than three times
greater than the median number of days for the frequent authors. The medians of
the occasional and infrequent authors decline by about half as we move down the
scale. This measure indicates that intensity of participation is strongly correlated
with frequency of participation. This finding is further supported by examining
the ratio of messages to days across different author groups. A larger ratio of messages
to days indicates a more intensive commitment to the group than a smaller
ratio. As shown in Table 6.4 on the page before, very frequent authors wrote an
average of 7.64 messages on every day they participated. At the same time, we
should note that down to the infrequent authors, participants averaged about two
posts for each day of participating.
The distribution of messages by threads offers a second mode of assessing the
behaviors of the participants. As discussed above, the nearly 46,000 messages
posted to the group found their way into nearly 8,500 different threads. As discussed
in Section 3.3 on page 51, every message contains a subject heading, which
permits organization of the newsgroup by thread. Authors who are following up
or replying to another message frequently will post a message in the same thread.
This is to ease the reading of the newsgroup, as most newsreading software allows
the user to select for reading only those articles matching indicating threads. In
other words, threads serve as cues to other readers that a message is “related” to
previous messages in the same thread. A thread can be viewed as miniature conversation
among the participating authors, and the newsgroup can be considered
to have as many simultaneous conversations as there are simultaneous threads.