Semantic Social Networks: A Mixed Methods Approach to Digital Ethnography

We propose a mixed methods approach to digital ethnographic research. Treating online conversational environments as communities that ethnographers engage with as in traditional fieldwork, we represent those conversations and the codes made by researchers thereon in network form. We call these networks “semantic social networks” (SSNs), as they incorporate information on social interaction and their meaning as perceived by informants as a group and use methods from network science to visualize these ethnographic data. We present an application of this method to a large online conversation about community provision of health and social care and discuss its potential for mobilizing collective intelligence.

[1]  William A. Woods,et al.  What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks , 1975 .

[2]  Keinosuke Fukunaga,et al.  A Branch and Bound Algorithm for Computing k-Nearest Neighbors , 1975, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[3]  Gerard Salton,et al.  A vector space model for automatic indexing , 1975, CACM.

[4]  Stuart C. Shapiro.  Representing and locating deduction rules in a semantic network , 1977, SGAR.

[5]  Leonard M. Freeman,et al.  A set of measures of centrality based upon betweenness , 1977 .

[6]  A. Tversky,et al.  The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. , 1981, Science.

[7]  John F. Sowa,et al.  Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine , 1983 .

[8]  H. Bernard.  Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches , 1988 .

[9]  Gerard Salton,et al.  Term-Weighting Approaches in Automatic Text Retrieval , 1988, Inf. Process. Manag..

[10]  John Scott.  Social Network Analysis , 1988 .

[11]  John F. Sowa,et al.  Conceptual graphs as a universal knowledge representation , 1992 .

[12]  Howard Rheingold,et al.  The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier , 2000 .

[13]  T. Snijders.  Stochastic actor-oriented models for network change , 1996 .

[14]  M. Strathern.  Cutting the Network , 1996 .

[15]  D. Hindman.  The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier , 1996 .

[16]  Pierre Lévy,et al.  Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace , 1997 .

[17]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks , 1998, Nature.

[18]  R. Burt.  The Network Structure Of Social Capital , 2000 .

[19]  Danny Miller,et al.  The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach , 2000 .

[20]  John F. Sowa,et al.  Knowledge representation: logical, philosophical, and computational foundations , 2000 .

[21]  Torill Mortensen,et al.  Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool , 2002 .

[22]  Philip N. Howard,et al.  Network Ethnography and the Hypermedia Organization: New Media, New Organizations, New Methods , 2002, New Media Soc..

[23]  U. Hannerz.  The global ecumene as a network of networks Ulf Mannerz , 2002 .

[24]  Carl Auerbach,et al.  Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis , 2003 .

[25]  M E J Newman,et al.  Finding and evaluating community structure in networks. , 2003, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[26]  A. Beaulieu.  Mediating ethnography: objectivity and the making of ethnographies of the internet , 2004 .

[27]  W. Dressler,et al.  Measuring Cultural Consonance: Examples with Special Reference to Measurement Theory in Anthropology , 2005 .

[28]  A. Coffey,et al.  Multimodal ethnography , 2006 .

[29]  Stanley Wasserman,et al.  Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications , 1994, Structural analysis in the social sciences.

[30]  Jean-Loup Guillaume,et al.  Fast unfolding of communities in large networks , 2008, 0803.0476.

[31]  D. Murthy.  Digital Ethnography , 2008 .

[32]  H. Russell Bernard,et al.  Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches , 2009 .

[33]  Daniel J. Brass,et al.  Network Analysis in the Social Sciences , 2009, Science.

[34]  Johnny Saldaña,et al.  The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers , 2009 .

[35]  J. Burrell.  The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research , 2009 .

[36]  Camille Roth,et al.  Social and semantic coevolution in knowledge networks , 2010, Soc. Networks.

[37]  Yana Volkovich,et al.  When the Wikipedians Talk: Network and Tree Structure of Wikipedia Discussion Pages , 2011, ICWSM.

[38]  Oliver Kramer,et al.  Dimensionality Reduction with Unsupervised Nearest Neighbors , 2013, Intelligent Systems Reference Library.

[39]  G. Barnett,et al.  News Framing in an International Context: A Semantic Network Analysis , 2014 .

[40]  P. Shankman.  Culture and Truth : The Remaking of Social Analysis , 2016 .

[41]  Michael G. Lacy,et al.  Online gaming involvement and its positive and negative consequences: A cognitive anthropological "cultural consensus" approach to psychiatric measurement and assessment , 2017, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[42]  Jeffrey G. Snodgrass,et al.  The social networks and distinctive experiences of intensively involved online gamers: A novel mixed methods approach , 2018, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[43]  Brandy L. Simula.  Book Review: The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, 3rd ed. , 2018 .