Helo David, I am not sure but I think most actual qualitative research tools do not support the HTML format yet. A solution would be copying and pasting the files you want to an simple TXT or RTF file and then word counting them with specific software. I also research Blogs and recently I have been using TAMS Analyzer for Mac to do my analysis and I have been following the same process cited above. In my research I do not count words (specially because I work with Japanese and counting words and kanjis - ideograms - is not a very precise method) but I do count the frequency of posts, the presence of comments and the use of other media formats like photos, video and audio. Within this setting I can affirm the number of posts in many cases goes steadily or tends to increase over time - one of the observed blogs has the average of over five hundred posts a month!! Wish you luck in your study. My regards, Aristides Emmanuel Pereira, M.A. Int. Cultural Studies PhD Candidate Department of Multi-Cultural Societies Graduate School of International Cultural Studies Tohoku University Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai-shi 980-8576 JAPAN www.bleepsblops.com Tel. +81-90-6255-2095 ************************************************************************
From: David Brake <d.r.brake@lse.ac.uk> Reply-To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org To: AoIR mailing list <air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: [Air-l] Website/weblog word counts Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 12:32:40 +0100
It just occurred to me one rough way of indicating the degree of engagement required to produce a given weblog is to point out the number of words you might find on one. I have a couple archived as HTML - is there an easy way to count how many words there are in a folder full of HTML pages? Has anyone done a study of the number of words on a typical weblog? Or in a typical weblog posting? Or of differing patterns of increasing or decreasing postings over time in a given body of weblogs?
FYI Apparently the average weblog comment is 63 words long according to G. Mishne and N. Glance (2006) Leave a Reply: An Analysis of Weblog Comments in WWW2006 http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/pubs/www2006- blogcomments.pdf
I just did a couple of manual word counts and one of my interviewees' weblogs varied between c 600 words one month to peak at over 11,000 words in each of two different months. --- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone)
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