The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism received tens of thousands of e-mails combined in multiple text files from the office of Gov. Scott Walker. At the request of Isthmus newspaper, which obtained the records in a lawsuit, a team of Center reporters analyzed the e-mails.
The e-mails first had to be sorted by date. The Center looked only at e-mails from Feb. 11 through Feb. 18, the dates requested by Isthmus.
The Center ran a computer script to chop up all the e-mails into individual numbered text files, shuffled the filenames using a random renaming program -- twice -- and took the first 2,000 files as its sample.
A team of reporters read each e-mail and logged it as for or against Walker, unclear or unrelated to the budget repair bill controversy.
Of the 1,910 e-mails during that time period that the reporters logged, 98 percent were related to the issues raised by the bill.
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Of the 1,865 bill-related e-mails:
r 97 percent expressed a clear position of support or opposition.
r 80 percent of e-mailers gave their locations or information such as an area code that reporters could use to locate them.
r 10 people sent more than one e-mail. They sent 30 e-mails total, 11 of them from a person who also sent the most e-mails in the entire data set.
-- Kate Golden
