Newcomer Integration in Online Knowledge Building Communities: Automated Dialogue Analysis in Integrative vs. Non-Integrative Blogger Communities

Online knowledge building communities (OKBC) reunite participants engaged in collaborative discourse. OKBCs can be made „smart“ by adding tools that predict how likely an OKBC is to integrate newcomers in existing dialogues and socio-cognitive structures. Starting from Bakhtin’s dialogical approach and polyphony theory, and building on the concept of interanimation of voices, this study explores the relationship between newcomer integration and dialogue quality in OKBCs. The automated analysis tool “Important Moments” was employed to compare two dialogues, from an integrative and from a non-integrative blog-based OKBC. In the former, the concepts, lexical chains and inter-animation moments occurred more frequently than in the latter. Also, newcomer comments were linked to less lexical chains in the integrative community than in the non-integrative OKBC. These findings suggest close relationships between dialogue quality and newcomer integration, which can be used for designing smart OKBCs.