Community: Issues, Definitions, and Operationalization on the Web Guo Zhang
[email protected] Elin K. Jacob
[email protected]
April 17, 2012
Outline • Motivation • Purpose and contribution • Operationalizating online communities • Conclusion and implication
Motivation
Widely used and accepted
u Ubiquity Interaction between offline communities and online communities represent one of the most significant products of information science and technology (IST) and a hallmark of the electronic era u Ambiguity No single definition Lack of understanding of their interrelationship Engender epistemological confusions
Questions • Is community a social entity or a collective imagining? • Is community geographically bounded? • Is community static? • Is community communication?
• Is an online community a reality or a virtuality? • Is an online community bounded? • Is an online community static? • Is an online community communication?
Purpose and Contributions
Theoretical Framework
Practical Application
Subjective phenomena
Objective interpretation
OPERATIONALIZING ONLINE COMMUNITIES • Theoretical operationalization: Four-dimensional perspective on space and place • Structural operationalization: Social network analysis
Theoretical Framework
Boundaries
Space and place
• Four-dimensional perspective on space and emergence and origin place (Zhang & Jacob, 2011, in press) practice
format s
the interactive role in human experience
Thus… • A traditional offline community is a "place" imbued with a sense of boundaries while an online community is a metaphor for such a “place” that triggers (or cues) human experience. • Offline and online communities are NOT mutually exclusive, nor are they hierarchically or temporally ordered. Rather, they are mutually complementary.
Structural operationalization: Social Network Analysis (SNA) to provide a relatively objective interpretation of these “subjective” phenomena.
Two crucial criteria for identifying a true community • Every member is similar to another or shares common values, interests, or intentions • Strong ties exist among members
HOW? • Committed memberships
• Influence as a whole
• Integration and affective connections among community members
• Relatively high frequencies of ties among members when compared to nonmembers • The closeness or reachability of community members. • The mutuality and frequency of ties between nodes.
Vertex similarity
Strongly connected social network
Edge betweenness Structural (quantitative)
Community
A group of similar members Strong ties
Social (qualitative)
Mutuality
Integration
Closeness/ Reachability
In@luence as a whole Shared emotional connections
Nodal degrees Relative frequency of Within-‐outside ties
Committed membership
Conclusion and implications
• Community as a "place” and online community as a metaphor for such a “place” • SNA: quantitative methods that can be used to operationalize and measure the subjective social phenomena • The design of semantically interlinked online communities (SIOCs)
