Friday, June 7, 2013

MDBirding Turns 1! Stats galore!

Putting together a full package of MDOsprey and MDBirding posts allowed me to gather the time-stamps from every MD-Listserv post ever sent. This sums to over 81,000 posts from 1997-2013. I made the below charts for my fellow stat-a-holics.


While this chart my seem overwhelming at first, it's actually really informative. A single line represents the number of monthly posts over a given year. By making a color-gradient over time, you can see both trends over time and the yearly 'migration bumps'. The end of 2012 and start to 2013 have been all record months in terms of the volume of posting. For those that want the actual numbers - check out the below table.




Here is just a chart that shows the total sum of posts by year. That 4/5-yr cycle between peaks sure seems a bit odd. I haven't been around long enough to comment, but I wonder if there are reasons for the peaks and valleys - invasion years? rarities? big-years?

This chart shows the sum of posts per day over the last year. You can get a great sense of the variability from day to day. The peaks are fun to examine. 9/9/12 at 63 posts was the highest and quite a few of those posts were about the Triadelphia Sabine's Gull. 11/12/12 was another peak where there were many posts about crossbills, a Western Kingbird, and a 'heated' banding code debate.

This was an interesting one. Who would have thought Monday would top the list? These are averages from 2004-2013.


Expected, but looks like we have a few nightowls!


Did I miss anything you'd like to see? Leave a comment and let me know.
Posted by at 6:32 AM

2 comments:

  1. sissypantsJune 7, 2013 at 6:31 PM

    Jared, absolutely great post! This kind of data is really cool, and I find that your results are consistent across most states, provinces, etc. Josh Vandermeulen has done something similar in Ontario, but I can't find his analysis post again. Did you have access to the database of listserve posts, or how did you script to gather all the timestamps?

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  2. Jared FJune 7, 2013 at 8:19 PM

    Thanks Zachary! The MD community switched listservs last year, and I've since been putting together a comprehensive database of all the posts from both listservs. That project is still in the works (link here http://goo.gl/Yv3Ak). Basically, I have indexed html files with all the dates/sender/subject. To gather the timestamps, I used a program called TextCrawler which lets you extract text using regex from multiple txt or html files at once. Then I just used some excel techniques to get the charts. Let me know if you find that link.

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