First Monday Article Published - Election bloggers: Methods for determining political influence

The Infoscape Research Lab is pleased to announce its first report from the Liberal Leadership Race 2006 was published in First Monday. The article Election bloggers: Methods for determining political influence is now online. The article discusses some methodological approaches to measuring political influence in the blogosphere.

Abstract

This paper discusses early findings and methodological pitfalls of a study of a hyper–mediated election campaign in Canada. Web logs — or “blogs” — serve as the primary object of study. The paper focuses on possible sources of large scale data (aggregated blogger posts) and methods of determining the political influence of bloggers. A series of methodologies are proposed to resolve the over–reliance upon information aggregators and blog search engines provided by Google and Technorati.