Using Deliberation-Centric Social Network Analysis to Measure Balkanization
8 Pages Posted: 10 Feb 2017
Date Written: February 9, 2017
Abstract
Existing approaches to social media analysis are deeply limited by the fact that they typically incorporate little or no information about the semantics of the user interactions: they analyze who talked to whom but not what they talked about. In this paper, we present deliberation-centric social network analysis, a "semi-formal" approach that is built around coding and analyzing the deliberative topology of discussions. The requisite coding can be done relatively quickly, even by non-experts, but enables analytics of unprecedented power. This paper will describe the technique, review the kind of novel analytics it enables, and demonstrate its application to assessing balkanization in a set of Reddit forums. We also consider some of the rich future possibilities of deliberation-centric social network analysis.
Keywords: social network analysis
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation