David Gauthier on Sun, 22 Jan 2017 13:39:25 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> Nettime Survey (1995-2016)


Dear Nettime,

We've been lurking here on and off over the years and have noticed that, 
although you have a legacy web interface for your archive 
(http://www.nettime.org/archives.php), no one seems to have produced a 
longitudinal study, a type of birds-eye view, of the who, what, and when that 
constitutes Nettime.

Curiously, we had questions: What amount of activity occurs here over time? 
What is your relative liveliness? Who have been your most prolific or 
provocative contributors? Do you have distinct cohorts? What are the messages 
that were the most popular/replied to? And so on... In an attempt to answer 
these questions and, perhaps, to raise others, linked below is the basic survey 
we devised over the past few months.

http://nettime-survey.xyz <http://nettime-survey.xyz/>

Here are a few of examples of the type of statistics that we've collected:

Activity - Totals

  year    messages    threads    replies in threads
------  ----------  ---------  --------------------
  1995          55          3                     4
  1996         575         64                   108
  1997        1305        194                   348
  1998        1286         78                   126
  1999        2449        148                   229
  2000        2766        283                   657
  2001        2338        248                   477
  2002        2043        246                   431
  2003        1669        210                   420
  2004         967        125                   244
  2005         814        115                   228
  2006         839        110                   302
  2007         886        132                   412
  2008        1068        212                   573
  2009        1076        191                   611
  2010         758        161                   458
  2011        1324        270                   802
  2012        1005        191                   607
  2013         697        129                   330
  2014         851        118                   389
  2015         803         98                   304
  2016         698         80                   350

Activity - Averages 

  year    avg. thread per message    avg. replies per thread
------  -------------------------  -------------------------
  1995                     0.0545                     1.3333
  1996                     0.1113                     1.6875
  1997                     0.1487                     1.7938
  1998                     0.0607                     1.6154
  1999                     0.0604                     1.5473
  2000                     0.1023                     2.3216
  2001                     0.1061                     1.9234
  2002                     0.1204                     1.7520
  2003                     0.1258                     2.0000
  2004                     0.1293                     1.9520
  2005                     0.1413                     1.9826
  2006                     0.1311                     2.7455
  2007                     0.1490                     3.1212
  2008                     0.1985                     2.7028
  2009                     0.1775                     3.1990
  2010                     0.2124                     2.8447
  2011                     0.2039                     2.9704
  2012                     0.1900                     3.1780
  2013                     0.1851                     2.5581
  2014                     0.1387                     3.2966
  2015                     0.1220                     3.1020
  2016                     0.1146                     4.3750

Messages per addresses

from                               messages
-------------------------------  ----------
geert{at}xs4all.nl                      888
patrice{at}xs4all.nl                    726
tbyfield{at}panix.com                   447
sondheim{at}panix.com                   388
morlockelloi{at}yahoo.com               260
jya{at}pipeline.com                     245
bhcontinentaldrift{at}gmail.com         220
bruces{at}well.com                      199
brian.holmes{at}wanadoo.fr              190
jaromil{at}dyne.org                     184

Threads per addresses

from                               nbr. initiated threads
-------------------------------  ------------------------
geert{at}xs4all.nl                                    145
patrice{at}xs4all.nl                                  126
felix{at}openflows.com                                 60
bhcontinentaldrift{at}gmail.com                        58
tbyfield{at}panix.com                                  56
brian.holmes{at}wanadoo.fr                             46
jaromil{at}dyne.org                                    40
sondheim{at}panix.com                                  39
jya{at}pipeline.com                                    36
newmedia{at}aol.c                                      34

Replies per addresses

from                               nbr. replies to threads
-------------------------------  -------------------------
morlockelloi{at}yahoo.com                              248
jya{at}pipeline.com                                    199
bhcontinentaldrift{at}gmail.com                        175
tbyfield{at}panix.com                                  167
jhopkins{at}neoscenes.net                              151
patrice{at}xs4all.nl                                   148
brian.holmes{at}wanadoo.fr                             118
jaromil{at}dyne.org                                    115
newmedia{at}aol.c                                      110
mgoldh{at}well.com                                     110

In the era of "big data," as a corpus, mailing lists are suprisingly 
understudied (perhaps it is because they are so small... -- your entire archive 
(1995-2016) is only ~210M and fits on my 2004 thumb drive). Nonetheless, we 
believe that legacy systems, such as open crawlable mailing lists (GNU 
Mailman/Pipermail/Mhonarc), may retrospectively, in the future, provide a more 
lasting historical record of digital culture than today's all enveloping 
corporate-guarded social media.

David and Marc


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