Monday, March 21, 2011

Ethnography Results - Week 6

Well, more of the same coming from /r/politics this week.  Many stories were posted with editorialized headlines that either twisted the article or asserted unproven or outright false claims as truth.  Withing the comments, I noticed many redditors calling out people for using 'true Scotsman' and other fallicies. 

As a way of gathering quantitative data this week, I tracked the front page of Reddit and recorded which categories the top 25 postings came from.  After gathering 3 seperate sets of data (75 postings), here are the results:
  • /r/pics - 14
  • /r/gaming - 12
  • /r/politics - 10
  • /r/videos - 8
  • /r/funny - 7
  • /r/IAmA - 6
  • /r/reddit.com - 5
  • /r/todayilearned - 5
  • /r/worldnews - 4
  • /r/AskReddit - 4
I would tend to divide these ten categories into two groups: thoughtful/serious (containing politics, IAmA, todayilearned, worldnews, and AskReddit) and leisure (pics, gaming, videos, reddit.com, and funny).  With this division, there are 29 postings (~39%) in the thoughtful/serious group and 46 (~61%) in the leisure group.  I plan to gather more sample data in the remaining weeks of this project to obtain a more accurate distribution of categories.

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