As I start my analysis of blog posts and comments – I can see I am going to need some method of organising and graphically representing the conversations. I have been looking at a couple of tools like NodeXL, but need to capture the sender/receiver relationship as well as the message/post/comment and the time/chronology.
Any thoughts?
What are blogs made of? Well I have been reading more articles from the batch I printed out “last year”. They have been very thought provoking. I don’t know why I essentially stopped work on my thesis last month (or maybe because I did take a break). Whatever the reason, this topics is really interesting and from the stack of articles on blogging and community – I clearly am not the only one who thinks so.
This conference paper (Ali-Hasan and Adamic 2007) is on Social Network Analysis (SNA) of blogging sites. I haven’t read much on this topic because seemed to be way to info-science-y for me, However, I am quite visual, so I thought it might help me get a handle on the data I am collecting through this ethnographic study on blogging, so I have done a quick graph. It doesn’t look like much yet, but I think the problem in my convential use of the blogroll as the edges.
The paper discusses several topic near and dear to me, including community metrics such as cohesion, reciprocity, density, and degree of interaction. I think that using these models paired with the typology of tagging may create diagrams which more accurately represent “community”, but we’ll see…
Ali-Hasan, N., & Adamic, L. (2007). Expressing social relationships on the blog through links and comments. Paper presented at the Intl. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO.
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