>From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@yahoo.com)
>Date: Wed Aug 08 2001 - 07:54:22 PDT
>
>http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/sr/xmca.8.8.gif
>You might argue
>that the ecological limits on time are sufficient to describe what is
>constraining these top six. But "memory" may be important for two reasons...
And here are some more thoughts about the matter. What Eva's link maps reveal
are a materially distributed memory -- memory shared among xmca *posting
participants* who refer to the writings of other posting participants. One way
to think of this is that a link represents the "lifetime" of an email, i.e. the
duration of time passing between when one email is sent, and when the semantic
material of that email is taken up by another person through the sending of
another email. The link connects the two emails, and is a measure of the
actions of one person (writing/thinking/remembering) about that of another,
through the materiality of electronic mail. [A strange digital materiality
fleetingly existing over network connections and then stored on the hard drives
of many computers, and printed or burned on cd-roms, where, who knows?] Old
messages no longer included in the content of what is in the here-and-now being
sent are "forgotten". The link captures the "remembering", which is
materialized through writing actions creating the email artifact. To borrow
from a biological metaphor of (evolutionary) memory, the link is the passing of
genetic material from one email to the next. And aside, using the measure of
the link map, any email may have from zero to perhaps tens of parents.
But, what Judy's email message (appears below) provides evidence for, with the
key phrases "yet again", and "signing off again" are an ontogenetic memory --
the indexing of her past participation and self-regulatory actions of
non-participation. The latter, I posit, is one of the processes, in addition to
the one of time constraints, constraining xmca posting participants in the top
categories from contributing more, and violating the PATTERN we call zipf's law
for the majority of xmca contributors. Actually, this is one of those things
that seems self-evident, but sometimes one has to articulate the obvious in
order to disentable the subtleties. Judy's participation violates zipfs law,
and this is reasonable since the mathematical recreation of the pattern (i.e.
derivation) assumes, as I mentioned before, that events in any category are
independent of prior events, i.e. postings by any person are independent of
their prior postings. For those people who post at more moderate levels than
the top six, this assumption may be true. Apparently for Judy, it is not true,
as she testifies, and as we see in the graph (the number of her postings is
represented by the sixth data point from the left in the blue plot on the
graph).
The reference to work with the grad student is an indication of the "openness"
of the xmca system, in which participation is the spending of time reading and
writing, in balance with time spent in activity outside xmca, and which varies
from one person to the next.
Thanks Judy!
>
>----------------------------
>
>From: Judith Diamondstone (diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu)
>Date: Wed Jun 27 2001 - 12:40:47 PDT
>>Sucked in yet again,
>
>eek
>I was scolding myself for answering non-essential email. It wasn't directed
>at anyone else -- sorry if it sounded as rude to anyone else as it did to
>me on reading it. Meanwhile, in an obligatory exchange w/ a doctoral
>student, signing off again,
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