"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches
With raw data for a newsgroups analysis available by design in a conveniently computer-readable format, it is tempting to use a quantitative content analysis approach, measuring participant structures and interaction quality on the basis of apparently easily computable figures. A closer look at the structure of the raw material will soon point out problems with this approach, however: while the most easily quantifiable characteristics of the individual newsgroup messages ('posts', 'postings', or 'articles') appear to be their sender ('poster') and their heading ('subject'), which is meant to indicate the topic, even a merely casual glance reveals that posters may have several different accounts, under slightly varying names, from which they are participating, and that posters may falsify the origin of their posts to claim they were sent by someone else.2 The connection between unique sender addresses and real-life individuals is therefore a problematic one. Bit 2
Similarly, as initial postings are replied to, the subject of the emerging 'thread' of messages often remains the same, while the discussion itself may move on from the initial topic to increasingly unrelated ones; as larger numbers of people participate, threads may even divide into sub-threads, focussing only on a sub-set of the points initially raised, or including only particular groups of participants. As threads develop, too, sometimes subjects are altered -- often retaining some reference to the original thread, as in "Caravan Live (was Re: Progressive Live Albums (1969-1976))". Thus, subjects are frequently inaccurate, with their accuracy depending crucially on the amount of attention paid by posters to their posts' headings (which is often very limited, and related to the users' experience with the medium). Bit 3

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© 1998 Axel Bruns