Eyes on You: Analyzing User Generated Content for Social Science.

Abstract

During the last few years the Internet has been increasingly used by people as a read-write medium. Thanks to the dropped prices and skills necessary to afford and use technologies aimed to create digital contents, a large amount of people in the world is now able to produce persistent digital information. The online network of communications is persistent, searchable, replicable and addressed to an invisible audience. Due to these properties online conversations may be analyzed with content analysis techniques, qualitative or quantitative. The aim of this paper is to show how this large amount of data might be used for sociological research. In particular, the paper will present either an example of research and a technological approach. Youtube.com is arguably the most popular site for people who are eager to share video across the Internet and it is the largest of all video sharing websites.

In order to understand new visual cultures of pregnancy and birth, one cannot fail to consider the impressive number of videos tagged with the words “pregnancy”, “birth” and “ultrasounds”. We aim at analyzing this contemporary phenomenon both by examining many videos, and by emphasizing the shift from birth as a private experience to parturition as a “networked event” potentially shared with anyone. One important aspect of this paper is the technological approach towards the realization of a software platform to retrieve information via web. This solution allows social scientists to manage data modeling, fruition and analysis using a new kind of service based application. The system manages data in RSS format, retrieves information by consuming service brokers provided by major web 2.0 sites. In addiction, our system allows indexing and search operation to allow end user to query optimize their tag classification and retrieve pertinent data transforming information by a graphical engine directly on the web.

Fonio, Chiara, Fabio Giglietto, Romeo Pruno, Luca Rossi, and Stefano Pedriol.
Eyes on You: Analyzing User Generated Content for Social Science.
Paper presented to the Conference Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0, York, UK  5 September 2007.

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