Hi, Linda. I started grad school in Instructional Technology at Vanderbilt 1995 (back in the days when Bransford, Kinser were there) and remember your work. I left academics for my wife to take a tenure-track position. She does Discourse analysis and uses Discursive Psychology. I have some experience pulling data out of various fora into forms that work with tools like ATLAS.ti.
I started using Discourse as a tool to teach my online classes. I promise that it’s worlds better than the discussion tools I’ve seen in Moodle, Sakai, or Canvas.
I think that Discourse’s measure of time spent reading is a bit more nuanced than some earlier measures of “time online”, so it may be more useful than you think. Rather than “how long was the modem on”, Discourse can sort-of tell if someone is reading stuff and for how long, a measure that I have not really seen in any other forum software. If someone spends all of their time posting messages and never reads any, they are not likely to be a very valuable contributor. I’m not aware of research that looks at those values, but I’ve been out of that game for a while.
I don’t think that it would be quite possible to use Discourse’s tags to mark posts the way one might with tools like ATLAS.ti or NVivo. Discourse’s tagging granularity is at the topic level, not even the post level; I’d think that you’d want to be able to code at the level of a sentence or paragraph.
Your questions seem to be from the perspective of one wanting to analyze discourse, not participate in it. From a user (not Discourse analysis) perspective, Discourse does a lot to support discourse. The searching features are as good as I have seen in other forums.
As mentioned already, for a participant, numbers are superfluous and noisy. I’ll admit to sometimes numbering things that I am talking or writing about, but if I get past 5, it’s a good bet that people have stopped listening.
The way that threading is indicated is confusing to people at first, but all the information you need is there. Each post is put at the end of the discussion. Which message one is replying to is made clear by links back up to the message one is replying to, and those replies also are indicated back up where the message one is replying to is.
A big win is that whether there are 8, 80, or 800 posts in a topic, one can just keep scrolling down to read the entire discussion. You don’t have to continually click to the next page to keep reading. (And don’t get me started on how many clicks it takes to read a discussion of more than 10 messages in Facebook).
If you haven’t seen it already, check out Discourse features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion.
A significant part of my living comes from moving communities from other platforms to Discourse. I think it would be a very interesting study to look at the structure of conversations before and after the transition. It could be an interesting study, as you could get data from multiple communities and the coder would not even need to know when the transition happened (since all data is now in Discourse). One could then see if there was some point in the data that conversation patterns changed.
Does that help?