Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example

Link naar online publicatie: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11915034_51

Auteur(s): Anjewierden, A. & Efimova, L.

Gepubliceerd: In: Robert Meersman, Zahir Tari and Pilar Herrero (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2006: OTM 2006 Workshops Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 4277 (pp.279-289). 2006, ISSN: 0302-9743. DOI: 10.1007/11915034 ©Springer-Verlag
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com
[Proceedings of the International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF'06), held in conjunction with the OnTheMove Federated Conferences (OTM'06), November 2-3, 2006, Montpellier, France]

Publicatienr: TI/SS/2006/067

Projectreferentie: Metis 2006/D2.4.3a

Samenvatting: Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology (Jones, 1997): researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to those traces and a growing number of methods and tools to collect and analyse them make such analysis increasingly attractive. However, a researcher is faced with difficult tasks of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and how the finding should be interpreted to say something meaningful about the community based on the traces of its members.
In this paper we present a framework that allows categorising digital traces of an online community along five dimensions (people, documents, terms, links and time) and then describe a tool that supports the analysis of community traces by combining several of them, illustrating the types of analysis possible using a dataset from a weblog community.