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Chapter 6
Analyzing the talk.abortion
Newsgroup
This chapter presents the analysis of the talk.abortion newsgroup. Section 6.1
focuses on the distribution of messages, types of authors and types of threads.
Section 6.2 on page 90 describes the reciprocity levels of the participating authors,
while Section 6.3 on page 95 assesses the threads and authors in terms of abortion
density and metacommunication density.
6.1 Authors, Threads and Messages in talk.abortion
Talk.abortion is a busy newsgroup. Over the course of the year, as illustrated in
Table 6.1 on the next page, nearly 46,000 messages were posted to the group by
almost three thousand different authors in close to 8,500 different threads. Assuming
a 7-day expiration period, 1 a reader of the newsgroup would have found
about 800 messages by 150 authors in 225 different threads on an “average” day.
1 The length of time an message remains available on a news site is a local decision. It varies
from site to site, and even within sites, from newsgroup to newsgroup. Here, a seven day expiration
period is assumed. Many sites seem to use the seven day period as their default, shortening it for
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