What Have We Talked About?
Austin Cory Bart, Clifford A. Shaffer · 2019
The SIGCSE-Members listserv has been archiving posts by the Computer Science Education community for the past 22 years. This paper characterizes the post collection, in order to better understand the nature of the community from a quantitative perspective. We apply a number of email mining techniques, including a topical analysis through N-grams. Threads, posters, and posts are characterized in terms of duration and temporally. We also demonstrate how emails from the listserv can be successfully classified using machine learning algorithms, and report on an unsuccessful attempt to predict thread popularity. All of the scripts we used to collect, process, and analyze the data are freely available in the hopes that other researchers will replicate, refine, and extend our results.