back to the stats

From: Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad@goteborg.utfors.se)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2001 - 04:05:28 PDT


Hi folks,
Now that Saturday is over (traditional low traffic weekday :-) I'm still
interested in any other backchannels than those that I know of, or, for
that matter, any other mailinglists that xmca subscribers find of interest
in ways that may compete for x-subscriber attention. What ARE the
interesting cyberplaces for "folks like us"?

But, back to the xmca statistics, with a downward trend of the number of
active contributors, and a downward trend in the absolute number of
postings by women, contrasting with an upward trend in the absolute number
of postings by men.
(charts still at http://hem.spray.se/eva.ekeblad/weaver/stats.html )

These trends antedate the existence of the two lists that Helena mentions
(started in the spring and the autumn of 2000). Looking at the charts, a
reasonable breaking point is the autumn of 1997: that is where the number
of active contributors turns from increasing to decreasing. There's an
administrative reason for why the turning point is there - although I don't
think it can fully explain why the downward trend has continued over so
many terms (although we MAY be experiencing another turning at the moment,
towards upward trends).

The autumn of 1997 is also a turning point for the amount of postings: for
the absolute number of postings from women there is a turn from a sligtly
upward trend to a downward trend, for the absolute number of postings from
men there is a turn from a fairly strong upward trend to a very weak upward
trend. Bluntly expressed, fewer guys post a lot more, fewer women post less.

In my view this cannot be explained by looking at the number of postings by
a handful of women among the top ten or top thirty contributors - because
that does not explain anything about why a slot in the top ranks (or any
rank) left by a woman is not filled by another eager female participant. It
has a certain interest, of a "gossipy" human kind (which also, as Mike Rose
observes, is intimately meshed into the total competence/performance), to
see the names of actual people connected with the not-quite-zipf
distribution, BUT it distracts the attention from the more general
phenomenon, the ABSTRACT cage of practices on a list.

What happened, administratively, in February 1998, was a technical change
of the subscription procedure. Before that the self-description of every
new subscriber went to the list - which automatically produced an increase
in the number of active contributors, both in terms of single-posting
contributors, and in terms of newcomers getting involved in a more or less
brief exchange of greetings and question-answers. the technical script was
also set to collect ALL selfdescriptions into one long file, and send them
back to the new subscriber. This practice, started when the list got going
as xmca, in September 1995 had gotten pretty unwieldy by 1997 as you can
imagine. For one thing, "true newcomers" got pretty overwhelmed as their
mailbox filled up with this file, in several parts. For another thing,
since there is no option to set this list to NOMAIL when you are going into
offline country for an extended period, many of the list regulars are in
the habit of unsubscribing and then resubscribing. In the context of this
practice the selfdescription thingy was an extra hassle for the individual
and the group. We had some discussion about the compulsory selfdescriptions
in the autumn of 1997 - I was against them, also on account of the
unnecessarily scary situation of "putting yourself in the limelight" before
you have gotten a sampling of what the list culture is like. Something that
may work against the more "timid" participants (while being no problem to
the "pushier").

I admit that I may have been wrong there: having selfdescriptions by
newcomers sent to the list as a regular feature may have been a good thing
for list dynamics.

But reinstating this would require a thorough reworking of the technical
procedure (which still, as far as I know includes a compulsory
selfdescription message as a part of the subscription procedure - although
this message is not used any further). And having been recruited as a
volunteer for a few such reworkings too many (all stranded on the inertia
of the weber tech setup) I will not pursue this idea any further.

regards
Eva

At 19.25 +0200 01-08-18, Eva Ekeblad scrobe:
>Only those two?
>wonders
>Eva
>
>At 11.06 -0500 01-08-18, Helena Worthen scrobe:
>>Dear people -- there is probably some impact on xmca of the development
>>of the
>>two other discussion lists that involve xmca people, multilogues and
>>pre-intellectus. These have appeared in the last year. Multilogues has
>>engaged
>>women and has created a supportive, intimate arena; pre-intellectus is
>>men and
>>women and has followed its own drift. But these two backchannels have
>>undoubtedly had an impact on xmca participation, if only because of the total
>>amount of time that anyone has to sit at the computer in a given day. In
>>addition, there is a certain amount of rehearsing for xmca that goes on in
>>these backchannels.
>>
>>Helena Worthen



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