December 2003 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

gini coefficients for measuring participation?
by Philip Howard 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

One possibility that would not involve writing a program, would be to calculate the distribution of messages in the same way that economists calculate the distribution of wealth in a country. They create an index of population (0% of the people to 100% of the people) and an index of the wealth (0% of the wealth to 100% of the wealth). In a perfectly egalitarian country 10% of the people have 10% of the wealth, 50% of the people have 50% of the wealth, etc, and you can graph the slope 1=1. In an inegalitarian country 10% of the people have 40% of the wealth, 50% of the people have 80% of the wealth and when you graph all of the points you get a curve of inequality. There is a basic calculus method for calculating the area of the graph between the perfectly egalitarian distribution (1=1 slope) and the ineglitarian distribution (wierd slope), and this is called the gini coefficient. Scandinavian countries ahve a small gini coefficient and Brazil has a big gini coefficient. So you might take a sample day or week, count the messages, and then label each message by the author's name. Say you have 1000 messages but only 100 authors. Graph this, 10% of the authors write XX% of the messages, 20% of the authors write XXX% of the messages, and so on up to 100% of the authors writing 100% of the messages. The area of the graph between the egalitarian distribution of messages and your sample gives you a measure of content inequality - how much of the content is generated by an elite group. If the metric is low your group is pretty egalitarian, if the metric is high you have a clique generating most of the content. The metric would be most meaningful if you could compare it to another group's metric, so if you did this over several sample periods, you could say whether the distribution of message posts was getting more or less egalitarian / elitist as the list was evolving. would make purdy graphs, and could be used for almost any sample of content & authors where you can attribute 100% of the content to 100% of the authors. p. Philip N. Howard Assistant Professor Department of Communication University of Washington http://faculty.washington.edu/pnhoward/

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RE: [Air-l] Late adolescents and dating on the Internet
by Frank Thomas 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

There is an article on the website of the New York Times today that shows the limits of the business: human feelings, saturation. It might help to situate your issue. And specially, what a term: increasing dating fatigue! Just Saying No to the Dating Industry December 2, 2003 By KATE ZERNIKE BY her own admission, Sara Cambridge was "totally cruising." She spent hours trolling online dating sites, sending e-mail messages to potential mates and creating "a real connection," which would invariably sour into deep disappointment within the first five minutes of an actual date. At which point she would return to the sites, send more e-mail, make another connection and suffer another snap disappointment. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/fashion/30SING.html?ex=1071533063&ei=1&en… Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company -- ...................... Dr. Frank Thomas FTR Internet Research Rosny, France

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post-docs
by Katerina 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

For those interested in post-doctoral opportunities, this is the only web site I found: http://www.postdocjobs.com K. Diamantaki

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RE: [Air-l] Late adolescents and dating on the Internet
by cecilie mortensen 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

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computer games and uzbekistan
by david silver 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

Uzbekistan and computer games, via the BBC and beth kolko: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3246092.stm david

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Grad Seat Monthly Report
by Nancy Baym 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

Here is the monthly report from the graduate representative Leslie Tkach Kawasaki. My email has been flaky this week, so I apologize to Leslie for not including it in the monthly report: This past month, in addition to giving opinions at times on various AoIR executive matters, I have mainly been (a) discussing AoIR with colleagues here and strategies for promoting AoIR here in Japan (translations are necessary!); and (b) considering potential activities for graduate students in Sussex next year. -- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org

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RE: [Air-l] how to measure participation rates
by Kylie Veale 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

Katerina, If youre looking at USENET newsgroups, you might want to take a look at the social accounting search engine NetScan at http://netscan.research.microsoft.com. I successfully used the muscle of their automated newsgroup participation statistics for a recent study I performed; Discussing Our Family Trees: Finding Community-Based Communication in Genealogical Newsgroups. I used the Common Ground Model of Whittaker, Terveen, Hill, and Cherny (1998), and the Online Community (OC) Model of Scoberth, Preece, and Heinzl (2003), to test for online community the NetScan database statistics worked fabulously well (though I did also use some manually collated stats for some specific OC tests). I studied four years of data for the newsgroup in my study, which had over 123,000 posts during that period. Regards Kylie Veale | Brisbane, Australia GradDipInvEnv, MInetStds [2003] email: kylie(a)veale.com.au www: http://casa.de.veale.com.au www: http://www.veale.com.au/kylie -----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin(a)aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Katerina Sent: Wednesday, 3 December 2003 1:42 AM To: air-l(a)aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] how to measure participation rates 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? Thank you, K. Diamantaki

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Late adolescents and dating on the Internet
by Michele White 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

Hello, My article, "On the Internet, Everybody Worries that You're a Dog: The Gender Expectations and Beauty Ideals of Online Personals and Text-Based Chat" presents a general consideration of Internet dating sites that is targeted at the undergraduate reader. I do a close analysis, indicate how Yahoo's dating/personals site and other Internet settings encourage traditional conceptions of the body, and introduce feminist methods that can be used to analyze these problems. I have more recent research on the issue of Internet representations but this article may be of interest to you because it specifically addresses Internet dating sites. The anthology was just released and the full citation is: White, Michele. "On the Internet, Everybody Worries that You're a Dog: The Gender Expectations and Beauty Ideals of Online Personals and Text-Based Chat." Readings in Gender Communication, eds. Mary Rose Williams and Phil Backlund, Wadsworth, 2003. All my best, Michele air-l(a)aoir.org writes: >Hi - >A colleague of mine is searching for any literature focusing on Internet >dating among late adolescents (approximately ages 18-25). Can anyone >pass on citations/resources? Thank you in advance for your help!

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RE: [Air-l] how to measure participation rates
by Charlie Breindahl 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

Katerina, If you're looking at USENET newsgroups, you might want to take a look at the social accounting search engine "NetScan" at http://netscan.research.microsoft.com. I successfully used the muscle of their automated newsgroup participation statistics for a recent study I performed; "Discussing Our Family Trees: Finding Community-Based Communication in Genealogical Newsgroups". I used the Common Ground Model of Whittaker, Terveen, Hill, and Cherny (1998), and the Online Community (OC) Model of Scoberth, Preece, and Heinzl (2003), to test for online community - the NetScan database statistics worked fabulously well (though I did also use some manually collated stats for some specific OC tests). I studied four years of data for the newsgroup in my study, which had over 123,000 posts during that period. Regards Kylie Veale | Brisbane, Australia GradDipInvEnv, MInetStds [2003] email: kylie(a)veale.com.au www: http://casa.de.veale.com.au www: http://www.veale.com.au/kylie -----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin(a)aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Katerina Sent: Wednesday, 3 December 2003 1:42 AM To: air-l(a)aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] how to measure participation rates 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? Thank you, K. Diamantaki

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The Multilingual Internet
by herring＠slis.indiana.edu 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

We are pleased to announce the publication of: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, Eds. (2003, November). The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture and Communication in Instant Messaging, Email and Chat. Special issue, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, volume 9, issue 1. Table of Contents: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring `"Introduction: The Multilingual Internet" David Palfreyman and Muhamed Al-Khalil "'A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use:' Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging" Yukiko Nishimura "Linguistic Innovations and Interactional Features of Casual Online Communication in Japanese" Hsi-Yao Su "The Multilingual and Multi-orthographic Taiwan-based Internet: Creative Uses of Writing Systems on College- affiliated BBSs" Dimitris Koutsogiannis and Bessie Mitsikopoulou "Greeklish and Greekness: Trends and Discourses of 'Glocalness'" Mercedes Durham "Language Choice on a Swiss Mailing List" Salvador Climent, Joaquim More, Antoni Oliver, Miriam Salvatierra, Imma Sanchez, Mariona Taule and Lluisa Vallmanya "Bilingual Newsgroups in Catalonia: A Challenge for Machine Translation" Sandi Michele de Oliveira "Breaking Conversational Norms on a Portuguese Users Network: Men as Adjudicators of Politeness?" Siriporn Panyametheekul and Susan C. Herring "Gender and Turn Allocation in a Thai Chat Room" ------------- The issue can be accessed at no cost at: http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol9/issue1/ ============================================ Susan C. Herring Professor of Information Science Adjunct Professor of Linguistics Indiana University Bloomington Email: herring(a)indiana.edu http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/ ============================================

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