Software for representation / analysis of internet discussion forums

[el don]

hi celso,

do not know whether this has been developed for our convenience as
analysts, but in the late 90's eva ekeblad published a couple of papers
with graphic representation of the ebb and flow of a mailing list
discussion, with a focus on what threads were carried on by how many
people and under what time constraints...
see for example:
http://hyperion.math.upatras.gr/commorg/ekeblad/multdyn.html
and
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Histarch/ekeblad/cocomu.html

not exactly what you are looking for with the web 2.0 version of
discussion forums being a different mode, but now you'd hope that this
could be converted into a graphic representation at the touch of a
button, so to speak. not necessarily automatically (although there would
be ways of coding for initiator, responder, commenter and so on, and
then mark up a text automatically with their signifiers, then go through
with another pass perhaps and focus on say, reply versus respond,
manually makr them up and then automatically have them linked to the
contributors, etc).

being an analyst of email discussion group interaction i also found the
following article most useful - apart for the fact that when dealing
with more than say 20 participants a day, who contribute an average of
two posts per day, the format she suggested began to get unwieldy.
simple but good though:
Harrison, S. 2003: "Computer-mediated interaction: using discourse maps
to represent multi-party, multi-topic asynchronous discussions", in
Sarangi, S. & van Leeuwen, T. (eds), Applied Linguistics and Communities
of Practice. London & New York: Continuum.


i also thought it would be good to represent contributions by way of a
'code swarm' where there is also a dynamic time elements factored in
to the representation. but then, i am not a coder, so i always hoped
someone could make the skeleton software...
see for a start:
http://www.michaelogawa.com/code_swarm/

mick o'donnell's corpus tool can be bent to your will perhaps - that's
for manual coding of text and graphics, but it has several outputs, more
being worked on at the moment  - might be worth while getting contact
with him to ask whether what you're looking for might also be possible
at some time.
http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/features.html

sounds like a great project to my ears anyway.
please keep us apprised of any progress.

best wishes,

lexie

On 27/1/2013, "Celso Alvarez Cáccamo" <lxalvarz at UDC.ES> wrote:

>Martin, thanks for the hint.
>
>OK, in most internet forum discussions (not all, I believe) one can reply to a given message within a "thread" (e.g. a debate about a piece of news in a journal). Sometimes this textual (or dialogue structure) link is represented with a right indentation, to distinguish between first-part comments and replies. Other comments are self-selected first-part turns, which may also be replied to, and so on. I'd like to get a graphical representation of these textual and dialogue-structure relationships, by showing the comments (or their numbers) surrounded by geometrical shapes (an oval, a circle) and linking them with lines, preferably horizontally, preferably along a horizontal timeline axis indicating when the comment was made. I guess no software exists that can just capture an entire thread and generate this graphic representation automatically, so I'd like to reproduce the thread structure like this, also representing other intertextual relationships with additional lines (sometimes a comment replies or alludes to two previous ones, or to more), something the page layout in forums doesn't capture. In short, something like a map or flow chart.
>
>Perhaps there's some component or utility in standar database programs that can output such a graphic layout from data such as:
>
>COMMENT # -  TEXT OF COMMENT - AUTHOR  -  TIME OF POSTING - IT REPLIES TO COMMENT(S) #
>
>-celso
>
>Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
>lxalvarz at udc.es
>=============
>
>
>A 2013/01/27, às 22:35, Martin Kopf escreveu:
>
>> Dear Celso,
>> 
>> In not entirely sure I understood what you're looking for.
>> But check out Prezi.
>> 
>> With some creativity you can do lots of interesting stuff
>> that might not have to do with presentations at all.
>> 
>> http://prezi.com/
>> 
>> Have fun and good luck,
>> 
>> Martin Kopf
>> 
>> 
>> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
>>> Datum: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:56:24 +0100
>>> Von: "Celso Alvarez Cáccamo" <lxalvarz at UDC.ES>
>>> An: DISCOURS at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>>> Betreff: Software for representation / analysis of internet discussion forums
>> 
>>> (Apologies for cross-posting)
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I wonder if anyone could recommend an easy to use (preferably free ;-) ;
>>> preferably for Mac OS X) software or utility to do graphic representations
>>> of comments and mini-dialogues in debates in internet forums, for example in
>>> bubble forms and/or flow charts, such as:
>>> 
>>> COMMENT 1 ------> COMMENT 3
>>>            |
>>> 	    --------------> COMMENT 7 -------> COMMENT 8
>>> 
>>> COMMENT 2 ------> COMMENT 5
>>> 
>>> etc.
>>> 
>>> The possibility to place comments and themes precisely in a timeline would
>>> be good, too. All this can be done manually, of course (with flow-chart or
>>> "mental map" utilities), but the idea is to enter the entire comment,
>>> enter backward and forward links (and cross-links) and be able to obtain
>>> various representations.
>>> 
>>> My experience with this type of software is NULL, whether for internet
>>> debates or for oral dialogue analysis.
>>> 
>>> Thank you very much,
>>> -celso
>>> 
>>> Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
>>> lxalvarz at udc.es
>>> =============
>