The Analysis of Online Communities using Interactive Content-based Social Networks

Today the Internet has become a convenient and ubiquitous platform for anyone with access to publish their thoughts and ideas, express their opinions, argue with their peers on various issues and, most importantly, organize and form online communities. Although video and image formats, and 3D environments are rapidly gaining popularity, the majority of usergenerated discussions on the Internet are still text-based. Many of these discussions are archived and readily available to organizers, developers and researchers of online communities. Being able to evaluate the internal processes of such communities is important for helping users seeking to join a community, managers or instructors hoping to facilitate participation and discussion in communities, and to researchers exploring the nature of social processes online. However, as yet, there is still no easy or cost effective method to study and analyze this ever growing mountain of textual data in real-time. This presentation describes a new, automated procedure and a prototype of our web application for making sense of online activities in real time.