Boudourides, Moses

Actor-Networks and Genres Analysis of a Mailing List

Abstract

Social network analysis provides an interesting methodology to study the communicative activities of actors-communicants inside a mailing list. Here, we dealt with a mailing list for an EU R&D project, covering discussions initially (August 2000) on the preparation of the proposal, then the negotiations with the EC, the initiation of the project (Spring 2000) and followed by other phases of the implementation of the project until the end of 2001 (this is an ongoing project terminating at the end of 2003). As the actors, i.e., the partners of the project, were exchanging e-mails inside the list, during various periods of time, they were participating into multiple threads of discussions. By processing the archives of this mailing list, we have derived the actor-networks of threaded e-mail-mediated interactions during successive periods of time (weeks and months). In these networks, the proximity between actors indicated the extent of their interaction through their participation in a large number of common threads of discussions; on the other side, a possible isolation of certain actors revealed their reluctance to interact with their partners during the studied period of time. In this way, we have analyzed various properties of these actor-networks as they were evolving in time (properties such as centralization, prominence, heterogeneity etc.) in order to understand the communicative dynamics of this group of actors-partners collaborating in the project. Moreover, inspired by the approaches of Orlikowski & Yates, by examining the content of the exchanged mailings in the mailing list, we have conducted a genres analysis of the communicative practices observed in this list. To do this, first, we needed to identify a number of characteristics of the exchanged mailings in terms of both their form and purpose. As a group of such characteristics could define a particular communicative genre, by checking the archives of this mailing list, we could determine which were the genres sustained by each mailing in the list and, thus, disclose the repertoire of genres occurring through the e-mail-mediated communication in the project. Furthermore, as the mailings of the list were exchanged over time, we could observe how the genres of this repertoire were evolving and varying in time. In this way, the aim was to locate how the adoption of the prevailing genres during a certain period was related, on the one hand, with the actual events of the project taking place in that period and, on the other hand, with the structural characteristics of the actor-networks being formed at the same time. In other words, our purpose was to study how the observed content-based genres were situated and embedded in the emergent structures of the underlying dynamic (time-dependent) actor-network.