-----Original Message----- From: David Wiley [mailto:david@wiley.ed.usu.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 4:07 PM To: 'air-l@aoir.org' Cc: david.wiley@usu.edu Subject: RE: [Air-l] Abstract: Measure of Discussion Activity in Threaded Discussion Spaces Thanks for your feedback! I'll try to address these issues all at once. First, as for the semantics of the d value, d is the average reply depth; in other words, d simply tells you what level of reply the average message is at. So, for the tiny thread: A (Reply depth of 0) -B (Reply depth of 1) --C (Reply depth of 2) The unadjusted reply depth would be (0+1+2)/3 = 1. The paper presents some adjustments to fine tune this value, which almost always lower it. So, the difference between d=13 and d=2 is that the d=13 thread would have to look like this: A -B --C ---D <snip> -----------L ------------M -------------N --------------O --------------O --------------O with many more 14th level replies for the value to ever get over 13, while a d=2 thread looks much more normal, something like: A -B --C ---D ---D ---D ---D d=13 tells you that one group is discussing something to a much more significant depth than the group whose d=2. As for the value seeming to grow in size as the number of messages grew, this should not happen as d is intended to be an average, and should therefore be unaffected by the size of the archive. The discussion in the paper is obviously not be clear enough (which is why I asked AoIR for feedback!). I will try to fix this. Also, would you be willing to send me the archive whose d=13 so that I could run it through our software here? I would love to see it! Perhaps it is domain specific, but in newsgroups dedicate to humanities you'll find very deep threads. Two examples I digged: alt.culture.fyrom and alt.news.macedonia . I checked your thumbnail in Hebrew public newsgroups (philosophy, to that matter), therefore I can't send you that archive. Have only just skimmed this but it looks excellent! Our goal was to create a value that provides a thumbnail of the level of discussion activity whose calculation is easily automated, so that it could be integrated into Course Management Systems and the like. It looks like this paper you've referenced could help improve our calculation. Many thanks for this pointer and your other feedback! Avner