Comment-based communities in the blogosphere (2011-2013)

Project Head: Olessia Koltsova
Project Participants: Sergei Koltcov, Sergey Nikolenko, Yury Rykov

This project supported by the Basic Research Program of NRU HSE investigated the structure of online discussions in order to uncover latent communities of socially important debate. The research reveals that discussion communities defined by shared commenting in the Russian language blogosphere are centered mainly around blog authors as opinion leaders and, to a lesser extent, around a shared topic or topics. These conclusions were derived from the dataset of 17386 full text posts written by top 2000 LiveJournal bloggers and over 520,000 comments that result in about 4.5 million edges in the network of co-commenting.

Publications
O. Koltsova, S. Koltcov, S. Nikolenko, Comment-based discussion communities in the Russian LiveJournal and their topical coherence, // HSE Basic Research Program preprint series in sociology, WP BRP 33/SOC/2013.
Кольцова О.Ю., Рыков Ю.Г., Кольцов С.Н. Картирование комментовых сообществ в Живом Журнале. Информационные системы для научных исследований: сборник научных статей. Труды XV Всероссийской объединенной конференции «Интернет и современное общество». Санкт-Петербург. 10-12 октября 2012г. – СПб., 2012. С. 239-242.

Materials
Koltsova O., Koltcov S., Nikolenko S. Comment-based communities in the Russian LiveJournal and their topical coherence. Presentation at the XXXIII Sunbelt Social Networks Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), 21-26 May 2013, Hamburg, Germany.
Koltsova O., Koltcov S. (with special thanks to S. Nikolenko). Comment-based communities in the Russian LiveJournal and their topical coherence. Poster at RUSSIR conference, Kazan, 16-21 September 2013.

Software used
TopicMiner (developed in LINIS)
“Louvain code” (developed at the university of Louvain, Belgium)
NodeXL (developed by Marc Smith, USA)

A set of LINIS codes and scripts