Hi all, In a time of low traffic and with the sad loss of Patricia I began to reflect upon the list. I know some people aren't too keen on reflection but I find it a useful process. What I've found is that the list has achieved far more than I thought and Patricia made a very major contribution,even bigger than I'd thought before. Each project or exchange considered in isolation maybe a relatively small moment but the reality is that over almost 6 years now (Fluxlist began in April 1996) Fluxlist has produced a substantial body of work.
The first area of my reflection was wanting to know just how many people had come and gone from the list over its life and how many posts they'd sent. To do this I used the Fluxlist date index at http://aporee.org/fluxus/list/maillist.html and I wrote a program to extract from the date index the author of each message and count the number of times their name appeared (i.e. how many messages they sent) and then write the results to an html file. Anyway the results are up at http://solnte.50g.com/stats/ biggish file (127k) but I wanted all names on one page so that people could see how much they'd participated. Of course since at various points the archive has been down there is a small error margin in these figures but the figures are certainly proportionally representative. Anyway if you want to see how many messages you've sent to Fluxlist have a look, senders are in alphabetical order. BTW - Any social science statistics heads are welcome to suggest futher interesting data we could extract from the archives/analyse. BTW - this is the beta version of this page since the html my program generated is slightly flawed in Netscape( Not in IE) and I haven't had time to re-write the code yet...just thought some of you may be as excited as me at these stats.....I only thought of a method of doing this analysis last friday and wanted to share results with you all as quickly as possible. cheers, Sol.
