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CHAPTER 6. ANALYZING THE TALK.ABORTION NEWSGROUP 97
and represent those parts of full words that are morphologically similar. Passing
words through a “stemming program” removes suffixes and prefixes, and normalizes
tense. This results in far fewer unique words, and allows a comparison among
words based on the “strong semantic links between the various forms of a root”
(Best 1996) word. A total of 11,263 unique stemmed words were found across
all messages. The resultant word lists were analyzed for unique words. A total of
7,570 words appeared in the coded messages. Of these, about one third (2,500)
appeared in at least one abortion and one metacommunication post. Close to half
(3,373) of the words appeared only in an abortion message, while the remainder
(1,697) appeared only in a metacommunication message. Of these, nearly 90
percent of the words appeared in fewer than three messages.
Two separate word lists were then created. The abortion word list includes words
appearing in at least three abortion messages, and for which the proportion of
abortion messages in which it appeared was at least five percent greater than the
proportion of metacommunication messages in which it appeared. An identical
procedure was followed to create the metacommunication word list. This procedure
results in an abortion list of 49 word stems, and a metacommunication list
of 19 word stems. Each word stem, of course, represents more than one individual
word. A total of 275 abortion words and 70 metacommunication words are
reflected by the stemmed word list. The word stems and unstemmed words are
included in Appendix B as Table B.1 on page 165 and Table B.2 on page 166.
Each message in the collection was then coded against these two lists. Following
a procedure suggested by Best (1996), two components were added together to
create the respective density scores. The first component was the proportion of
word stems on each list matched by the message. The second component was the
proportion of word stems in the message matching a word stem on the list. For example,
Message A contains a total of 120 word stems, including 75 unique word
stems, and 45 duplicated word stems. Of the 75 unique word stems, seven are
found on the abortion word list. The first component of the abortion density score
would thus be the proportion of unique words matching the abortion word list to
words on the abortion word list, or 7=49 = :058. Of the 120 word stems, a total of
11 match word stems found on the abortion list (two of the seven unique matches
are used twice, and one is used three times). The second component of the abortion
density score would thus be the proportion of words matching the abortion
word list to total words in the post, or 11=120 = :09. The abortion density score
assigned to this post would be :058 + :09 = :148. Abortion and metacommunication
density scores were calculated for each message in the newsgroup, and