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

  • Authors:

  • Anjo Anjewierden;Lilia Efimova

  • Affiliations:

  • Human-Computer Studies Laboratory, University of Amsterdam, VA Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Telematica Instituut, Enschede, AN, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • OTM'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: AWeSOMe, CAMS, COMINF, IS, KSinBIT, MIOS-CIAO, MONET - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology [16] : researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to Relatively easy access to these 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 the difficult task of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and how the findings 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.