Hello everyone, This will be quite an imposition, given that this is an awkward and open-ended message directed mostly to those on the list who, unlike myself, have some background in quantitative research methods. Lacking this knowledge is not the only reason this message will be clumsy: compounding the problem is the lack of any defined research question (!). Essentially, I am curious about some of the possible uses of the kind of data I will describe below. For the past five years I have managed the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink (www.centrelink.org) and Kacike: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology (www.kacike.org). I think of both sites, differences taken into account, in kin terms as siblings (don't get me wrong: I don't also think of one as male and the other as female, nor do I have pet names for them). Over these years, the following kind of data have been amassed, without any deliberate and focused purpose (other than having for the sake of having): 1. countries and cities where visitors are based 2. referring URLs 3. entry and exit pages + most popular pages on the site 4. numbers of unique and repeat visitors, plus hits 5. hourly, daily, weekly and monthly traffic reports 6. key search terms used 7. key search phrases used 8. entries in guestbooks and online questionnaires 9. e-mail feedback received + messages posted via online email forms 10. entries in online polls Now, having glanced at that, what kinds of questions could be posed with reference to this data? What kinds of questions can potentially result in plausible answers? Market-research types of questions seem obvious, though that might not be bad for developing some sort of "user model", as I hear people refer to this. Anything else, maybe more exciting? Having asked that, would anyone like to suggest some of the best methods for examining this data, with respect to any questions above, and I can always chase up methods handbooks to learn more. (Some questions, of course, are easy to answer based on the above, i.e. "on which days of the week are sites most visited?" or "based on the countries where visitors are based, which are the primary national markets for these sites?"--from the basic questions that the statistical site monitoring packages themselves answer, I have been able to quickly determine that the most frequent visitors are based in US universities, tending to visit during mid-week, and especially during the fall and winter semesters. Other frequent visitors are .mil people and robots...a friendly audience, I am sure. On a more qualitative level, all that really strikes me is that those who deliberately provide feedback are either scholars/students, and supportive activists--those with largely negative or otherwise critical opinions have largely chosen silence.) It has taken me months to get over the hesitation in asking so much in one question, and then I realized I would probably never do anything with all of this (apart from coming to impressionistic overviews) unless I asked. Many thanks and very best wishes for the holidays, Max. Dr. Maximilian C. Forte Assistant Professor Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology University College of Cape Breton 1250 Grand Lake Road P.O. Box 5300 Sydney, NS B1P-6L2, Canada E-mail: max_forte@uccb.ca Faculty Web page: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/mforte/ Office B.273 Telephone: 902-563-1947