A little knowledge can be dangerous

I know that I just talked about re-focusing my research on the RQ and not getting sidetracked, but it is so hard when there are so many cool aspects of blogging to investigate. I have been reading more articles and I have gotten it into my head that I really need to conduct some kind of social network analysis (SNA) along with my ethnographic approach to the subject.

So it was quite exciting when I found an article in which the authors discuss merging SNA with text analysis to “support the understanding of specific conversational clouds [18] and the ‘cloudmakers’ behind them [20]” (Anjewierden and Efimova 2006).  They go on to describe five  dimensions of blog community characteristics (identifiers?) (1) document (posts, comments), (2) term (topics, key concepts), (3) person (community member), (4) link (blogroll, trackback, hyperlinks), and (5) time (post/comment publication date).  They use these dimensions in tOKo analysis software.

I would like to try a similar analysis (although I would really like to include tagging as one of the dimensions to capture the ontology of the community as well).  However, the software only recognises Movable Type blog exports and unfortunately I haven’t found an easy way to convert WordPress’s form of XML to MT.  I also thought of using the dataset from the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) which includes 44 million posts from August to October 2008.  It is also in XML, so I now need to decide how far I go down this path.  Should a spend the time looking for (or developing – it is open source after all) a converter so I can do the analysis or do I get back on my original path?  That’s the problem (good thing?) about research, once you know a little, you want to know more…

Anjewierden, A., & Efimova, L. (2006). Understanding Weblog Communities Through Digital Traces: A Framework, a Tool and an Example On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2006: OTM 2006 Workshops (Vol. 4277/2006, pp. 279-289). Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer.

Word of the Day – Community

Define community.  It reminds me of the scene in Reality Bites (a film I have unsuccessfully been trying to forget from the moment I saw it).  It did have a few not-completely-annoying scenes, though, including when Winona Rider’s character was asked to define ‘irony’ in a job interview.

Irony. Uh…
Irony.
It’s a noun.
It’s when something is… ironic. It’s, uh…
Well, I can’t really define irony… but I know it when I see it!

I can completely relate to that because every time I am asked – “what do you mean by blog community?” – I revert to a stuttering mess.  “uh, well, you know when community members interact within a community…well, I can’t really define it, but I think I’ll recognise it when I see it.”  Yikes.  So I have decided that I should really get a better definition (at least in my own mind) of community.

There are many academic articles which define community and that is part of the problem (see http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22/open-issues-for-researchthinking-on-communities/).  But as I have been reading articles on blogging communities, some patterns have emerged in characteristics of these unusual communities.

1. Community in a blog context is a continually changing beast.  Some authors describe the ‘burstiness’ of blogging behaviour among community members – meaning that some topics are hot and there is heaps of activity and some times it is pretty quiet.  Moreover, the community members come and go and in the case of lurkers, are never really ever “there” visibly except statistically.  So with this ebb and flow of interaction and membership, blogging communities are not really defined by firm borders, but are more like amorphous blobs.
2. Identifying blog communities requires detective work.  When I first started thinking about blogs, I thought about what makes up a blog community i.e. blogs, blogger, commenters, and readers.  However, it is difficult to identify blog communities by looking for these object (nodes).  The telltale signs of blog communities come from the links, connections and spaces between the artefacts of blogs (see https://doc.freeband.nl/dsweb/Get/Document-46041/weblog_community_boundaries.pdf).  It is difficult to read and correctly interpret this space between the people and the blogs.  It requires someone who knows what they are looking for in the nuances of links, references, and terminology used.

So what is community, (hopefully) I’ll know it when I see it…