Software for representation / analysis of internet discussion forums

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Hi lexie (el don),

Thanks for all those leads and references. It is obvious I am not a discourse corpus analyst ;-), so I don't even know how to explain myself clearly; but something like those maps is what I'd like to get, but in a simpler way. I wouldn't code for content, but only for participation structure, and in a basic way that could reflect the flow of comments along time, and the relative weight or presence of participants, alliances and counteralliances (alignments), and "teams" (coded with colors, for example) for shortish threads on pieces of news (public debate), no longer than, say, 100 or 200 comments. At any rate, this would only be a tool to have an overall picture of those issues, so user-friendliness would be important. I think I'm no dumb with computers, but I must confess that some of the analysis software that I've had a (very cursory) look at confuse me quite a bit in terms of the categories, labels and procedures used. To me, they are not particularly intuitive, as they don't seem to match how I would treat the text or groups of texts manually. But I guess it's a matter of mental translation, too.

I'll have a look at those tools. Thanks again!

Best,
-celso

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
=============

A 2013/01/28, às 12:21, el don escreveu:

> 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
>>>> =============
>>