Hi Katerina,

I did a thing like that semi-manual. A bit boring maybe, but not impossible and I am definitely not a programmer.
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.
I deleted everything that was not the author tag, and transferred the result of this to MS Excel.
In Excel I sorted, and then did some counting. I even computed a Lorenz Curve.

If you want to know more about how I did this, I can send you the Excel-file.
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.

Kind regards,

Carlo Hagemann

Katerina wrote:

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