Spotlight on Spotlight - Carol Smith Home Page

Smith 8
1. The target html page was opened within a web browser.
2. Because a straight copy/paste routine would have captured undesirable information
and hyperlinks related extraneous to the message, each page was then reloaded via
the page’s ‘Printer-friendly’ hyperlink.
3. The message was copied in its entirety using cmd-a/cmd-c keyboard shortcuts
(Macintosh).
4. Using the cmd-v keyboard shortcut (Macintosh), the message was then pasted into a
new plain text document, using Apple’s TextEdit application.
5. Two corrections were made to each plain text document:
a. The phrase “Return to Message” (a hyperlink in the original page) was
deleted from the end of each document.
b. In order to avoid web crawler agents, the original html pages provide e-mail
addresses in .gif format. For this reason, each author’s e-mail address
information needed to be entered manually.
6. Each plain text file was then saved to the hard drive.
7. A small percentage of message board postings were accompanied by .jpg
attachments, typically scanned documents relating to the message. Each of these
attachments (22 in all) was saved as separate data set files. Each attachment had to
first be loaded into a separate browser window, for some unknown reason,
attachments could only be saved as .gif images without this extra step, even though
the extension of the attachment indicated it was a .jpg file.
After some consideration, it was decided to name each text file sequentially, beginning with
001, 002, 003, etc. If an initial message board posting received replies, each posting of a
single thread were given the same number, but distinguished with sequential letters; e.g.,
001a, 001b, 001c, etc… Some thought was given as to whether file names should indicate
the level of depth in a particular thread; that is, if a posting was the second reply to a reply of
an initial posting, label it 001aab. This level of complexity was deemed unnecessary,
however, as any thread in question could be easily located in its original web location, should
the sequence of postings become of interest.
Data Set Issues
As described in the Functional Analysis section below, two decisions made during the
creation of the initial data set proved problematic, and required further data set modification:
1. Because Mac files do not require extensions (.txt, .doc, etc.), extensions were not
initially entered during the file-naming step.
2. Documents were initially saved to separate sub-folders for each of the Internet
message boards (i.e., “Ancestry-Minnick”; “Ancestry-Minick”; “Ancestry-Minck”;
“Ancestry-Minnich”; “Ancestry-Minich”; “Ancestry-Mink”). Attachments were
further segregated into folders within these folders, labeled “Ancestry-Minnick-
Images”, etc. Finally, all six subfolders were contained within a single top-level folder
labeled “<strong>Spotlight</strong> Data Set.”
It should also be noted that the fielded format of the documents in their original web format