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CHAPTER 6. ANALYZING THE TALK.ABORTION NEWSGROUP 96 sages; and the desire to avoid sampling content, given the distribution patterns among threads and authors (see Section 6.1 on page 76). The purpose of the quality measure, was to generate a score for each message reflecting the relative amounts of abortion-related and what is labeled “metacommunication” related content. Metacommunication content is defined as self-reflective communication: all discussion concerning the newsgroup or the conversation itself, as well as the participants and their behavior within the conversation. Abortion content is defined as any communication related to the issue or topic of abortion. 7 One method to complete this assessment is to compare the words used in the message to words used in a sample of messages that have been coded using traditional content analysis protocols. A sample of 1,300 messages was selected, stratified by week of message and author frequency. Each of the sampled messages was coded for the presence or absence of both abortion and metacommunication content. Messages with abortion content present were identified as “abortion related messages.” Messages with abortion content absent and metacommunication content present were coded as “metacommunication messages.” Messages with neither abortion nor metacommunication content were coded as “missing.” A total of 582 messages were coded as abortion, 524 messages were as metacommunication, and 194 as missing. Following Best (1996), a concordance and stemming procedure was designed to score messages for similarity to the coded messages. A stemmed word concordance was performed on all abortion messages and all metacommunication messages. A word concordance is simply a list of all full words appearing in a message or group of messages. A full word is a sequence of of characters (letters and numerals) separated by “non-word” characters (white space, commas, dashes, punctuation, etc.) appearing on original lines of text. A total of 32,953 unique full words (among 2.7 million total words) were found across all messages in the newsgroup. This list is first limited to words having more than three letters. Secondly, this list is compared against a list of the 120 most “common” English words; words appearing on the “stop” list are disregarded. Finally, words are stripped of their prefix and suffix, and reduced to “stemmed words. Stemmed words are those portions of full words remaining after suffixes and prefixes have been removed, 7 This definition was interpreted very liberally in the content analysis. For example, while the material quoted from previous texts was not included in the density scores, it was considered when coding a message as related to abortion.
CHAPTER 6. ANALYZING THE TALK.ABORTION NEWSGROUP 97 and represent those parts of full words that are morphologically similar. Passing words through a “stemming program” removes suffixes and prefixes, and normalizes tense. This results in far fewer unique words, and allows a comparison among words based on the “strong semantic links between the various forms of a root” (Best 1996) word. A total of 11,263 unique stemmed words were found across all messages. The resultant word lists were analyzed for unique words. A total of 7,570 words appeared in the coded messages. Of these, about one third (2,500) appeared in at least one abortion and one metacommunication post. Close to half (3,373) of the words appeared only in an abortion message, while the remainder (1,697) appeared only in a metacommunication message. Of these, nearly 90 percent of the words appeared in fewer than three messages. Two separate word lists were then created. The abortion word list includes words appearing in at least three abortion messages, and for which the proportion of abortion messages in which it appeared was at least five percent greater than the proportion of metacommunication messages in which it appeared. An identical procedure was followed to create the metacommunication word list. This procedure results in an abortion list of 49 word stems, and a metacommunication list of 19 word stems. Each word stem, of course, represents more than one individual word. A total of 275 abortion words and 70 metacommunication words are reflected by the stemmed word list. The word stems and unstemmed words are included in Appendix B as Table B.1 on page 165 and Table B.2 on page 166. Each message in the collection was then coded against these two lists. Following a procedure suggested by Best (1996), two components were added together to create the respective density scores. The first component was the proportion of word stems on each list matched by the message. The second component was the proportion of word stems in the message matching a word stem on the list. For example, Message A contains a total of 120 word stems, including 75 unique word stems, and 45 duplicated word stems. Of the 75 unique word stems, seven are found on the abortion word list. The first component of the abortion density score would thus be the proportion of unique words matching the abortion word list to words on the abortion word list, or 7=49 = :058. Of the 120 word stems, a total of 11 match word stems found on the abortion list (two of the seven unique matches are used twice, and one is used three times). The second component of the abortion density score would thus be the proportion of words matching the abortion word list to total words in the post, or 11=120 = :09. The abortion density score assigned to this post would be :058 + :09 = :148. Abortion and metacommunication density scores were calculated for each message in the newsgroup, and
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CHAPTER 1. COMPUTERS, CONVERSATION
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 177 Best, Michael L. 1
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 Fisher, Bonnie, Mi
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 181 Hiltz, Starr Roxan
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 Pateman, Carole. 1
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