ACTIVITY 9.2
Investigating the Community

Now that you have decided on a virtual community to study, you need to join it, to lurk in it, and to participate in it for a given period of time. Your teacher and your class will be able to determine how much time you will have to investigate your community. Remember, the more data you collect, the better your chances are of conducting an in-depth analysis. You should plan on logging on to your community at least once a day-more, if possible.

Step 1: Collecting Data

Start keeping a log of your visits and observations. Each time you log onto your virtual community, you should note the date, day of the week, and time. Whenever possible, capture a transcript, save the newsgroup thread, or save in a folder E-mail messages you receive from your community's listserv. During and at the end of each on-line session, write a reflection on what you observed or learned about the community during that session. The following items will help you structure your observations. Note that these are suggestive rather than exhaustive. The type and nature of the community you actually study might lead you to create your own questions and categories. Also note that the following are investigative categories. Although they will help you observe, evaluate, and categorize your data, you should realize that you may or may not use all your observations, and the items below do not constitute an outline for your paper.

Information about the community

-Is there a frequently asked questions (FAQ) file or message available for the group? If so, seek it out and read it carefully. Such documents often give crucial background information such as the purpose of the group, the owner of the list, and the rules of participation.

Quantitative data

-For a synchronous environment, how many messages are sent during a given session? For an asynchronous community, how many messages are sent over a give time period-a day or a week?

-How long are the messages (in number of words)? How long are the longest ones? How long are the shortest ones? What is the average message length?

-How many people contribute messages in a given session or over a given period of time?

Demographic data

-How many females contribute to your community? How many males?

-What can you tell about the race, class, education levels, and ages of the members of your community? In following a listserv or a Usenet newsgroup, you can often infer much about participants' ages, genders, and affiliations if they use a signature file with their messages. Such "sig files" might offer professional titles, places of work, and so on. Also, you can often tell people's affiliations from their E-mail messages. For example, wbutler@umich.edu indicates that my E-mail account is through an educational institution (edu) and, more specifically, the University of Michigan (umich). By contrast, some participants might have name@aol.com addresses, which indicates they are America Online members.

-How many people are subscribed to the listserv? You can get a directory of a list's subscribers by sending a REVIEW message to the listserv that hosts the list. For example, if we wanted to get a list of subcribers to the list acw-l (The Alliance for Computers and Writing), we would send the following message to listproc@listserv.ttu.edu:

REVIEW acw-l

-Looking at the list of subscribers, can you tell where most of them are from? Do their E-mail addresses connect them with educational institutions (edu), businesses (com), the military (mil), etc? Do country extensions identify some members as international (ca=Canada, au=Australia, uk=United Kingdom)? How many names are clearly masculine? How many clearly feminine? How many are ambiguous (Leslie, Jan, Dene, Kim, etc.)? How does the overall list compare with the list of active contributors? What's the overall gender balance in this community?

Social dynamics

-Describe any "incidents" within the community such as flame wars, poignant moments of community building, and so forth.

-Do any "personalities" emerge? Who are the more frequent participants? Who seems to ask questions? Who seems most often to answer questions?

-How much do participants interact?

-Any evidence that participants "listen" to one another or not?

-Which participants seem to be "friends" and which seem to be "adversaries"?

-Who seems to lead and who seems to follow?

Linguistic/Content Data

-What kind of language is used? Is most of the language informal, characterized by slang, profanity, and speechlike writing? Is most of the language formal, characterized by essaylike writing with objective language, technical jargon, complex sentences, and other markers of formal language? Or, does the formality or informality of language vary from participant to participant, topic to topic, time to time?

-What kinds of information are shared? How much of the content of the contributions is factual, information giving, question asking, playing/socializing, and so on?

-What can you infer about the community's standards of netiquette? Do longtime members greet newbies graciously, or are naive questions by newbies met with insults and derision? Do members chide those who use profanity or contribute off-topic messages?