Infoscape Research Member Zachary Devereaux presented his newest paper this week. The paper "Shallow, Narrow, Deep and Wide: Issue Crawling for Chinese Adoption" was co-authored with Stan Ruecker, Sara Dorow, Heather Jiang, and Christopher Moore. The paper was presented at the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis [1], sponsored by TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research [2]). CaSTA 2006 was hosted at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB.
Paper Abstract
The purpose of this project is to investigate the changing contexts of meaning and practice in Chinese adoption by mapping online networks of adoption-related groups and issues in Canada. The resulting data set contributes to scholarly knowledge in the areas of transnational identity formation, comparative social and national contexts of adoption, and methodological developments in participatory research and web interface technologies. In this paper, we discuss the preliminary results of the online mapping activity, addressing in particular the variations in data obtained by adjusting the settings of the crawler in two significant dimensions: depth and iterations. By providing readings of the crawler’s hyperlinkage maps from three different perspectives—naïve reader, domain expert, and mapping expert—we suggest the value of this approach to researchers examining a topic from various levels of expertise. We also point out the usefulness of doing comparative mappings of this kind, as a means of triangulating in on the significant features of each crawl.
Links:
[1] http://www.lib.unb.ca/casta2006/
[2] http://tapor.humanities.mcmaster.ca/home.html
