Discussion Workshop: Web analysis of politics, online ideas, discussions and trends

Organizers

Langlois, Ganaele; Elmer, Greg; McKelvey, Fenwick (Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University, Canada)

Mike Thelwall (Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK)

This Politics-Web 2.0 half-day workshop will focus on (a) the circulation of political content in and through Web 2.0 platforms and the Web, and (b) quantitative approaches for more general social science web research. To date, most research about online political communication has focused on developing methodologies and tools that are suitable for a pre-Web 2.0 environment. Traditionally, methodologies used to examine the circulation of information online have focused on textual analysis and on the hyperlink as a way to measure how websites link to each other and how stories circulate on the Web (Rogers, 2006; Elmer 2006a, 2006b; Thelwall, 2004, 2009). The arrival of user-generated content and online social media poses both technological and methodological problems. Technologically, Web 2.0 websites make use of multi-media materials (text, sound, movies, images) and do not use the traditional HTML language, thus making most conventional Web data collection tools obsolete. From a methodological perspective, the rise of platforms with different formats and social purposes (i.e., social networks that create personalized and private spaces as opposed to websites that publicly disseminate information through video-sharing) forces researchers to acknowledge the greater range of communicational and cultural contexts fostered by Web 2.0. The proliferation of different contexts means that a single unit of analysis such as the hyperlink is insufficient, and a more multi-modal approach to the tracking of information within and across platforms is needed.

Following two introductory half-hour talks there will be a two hour discussion session (split into groups with a maximum size of 10), with each participant having the chance to present a quick overview of their topic, and how they have conducted relevant web analyses or how they plan to do so in the future.

References

Elmer, Greg. 2006a. The Vertical (Layered) Net, in David Silver (ed.) Critical Cyberculture Studies: New Directions, 159-167. New York: NYU Press.

Elmer, Greg. 2006b. Retooling the Web: Parsing the Links, Codes, and Commands of the Web World. Convergence , Vol. 12.1.

Elmer, G., Ryan, P. M., Devereaux, Z., Langlois, G., Redden, J., & McKelvey, F. 2007. Election bloggers: Methods for determining political influence. First
Monday, 12.4.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/elmer/index.html [1]

Rogers, Richard. 2006. Information Politics on the Web. Cambridge: the MIT Press.
Thelwall, M. 2004. Link analysis: An information science approach. San Diego: Academic Press.

Thelwall, M. 2009. Webometrics. New York: Morgan & Claypool.

Contact

Mike Thelwall

University of Wolverhampton

M.Thelwall-at-wlv.ac.uk

http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/ [2]

Ganaele Langlois

Infoscape Research Lab

Ryerson University

ganalanglois-at-gmail.com

www.infoscapelab.ca [3]