[AIR-L] live-journal research

[Kathy Mancuso]

Hi Radhika and AoIRers--

I've been reading the LJ research communities and such forever, and
the answer to your question seems to be that there IS no good answer. 
Besides the folks on my panel for the American Anthropological
Association meetings in the fall, and the citations I list below, a
couple of people have written dissertations, which I'll be glad to
point you to once my computer comes back from the repair shop. 
However, the LJ staff has actually ceased to help social science
researchers because they never seem to produce anything or give
anything back to the community.  For my part, I'm not sure how to give
back to the community--I posted in the main LJ-research community
saying my stuff was done, pointing people to the abstract, and
mentioning that I'd be glad to send my research out, and nobody's been
interested in it.

Here's what I have that directly addresses livejournal.  The
communities <lj user=metajournal> and <lj user=lj_research> also
address these issues.  As always, I'd really appreciate more sources! 
There's also a lot of little applets that map friends networks and
interests which could be useful in a research way--I have a collection
of these too.

--kathy

Google scholar brought me these:

Contribution in Online Communities
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:g3YuQ9Zj-jEJ:www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~jweisz/papers/F03/cscw.pdf+livejournal

Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:7L20xbkJ1LUJ:www.blogninja.com/vsw-draft-paolillo-wright-foaf.pdf+livejournal

Achieving Privacy in Hyperblogging Communities
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:4x-M9DRe864J:www.sics.se/privacy/wholes2004/papers/kozlov.pdf+livejournal

Running Head: Language Use Surrounding September 11
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:4zPLchN_VkoJ:homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/reprints/LiveJournal.pdf+livejournal

Implicit Links in Asynchronous Communication
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:AthzwW2fQDsJ:www.datawar.net/medynskiy%2520implicit%2520links.pdf+livejournal

A Matter of Life or Death:Modeling Blog Mortality
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:dvGy46OUt6IJ:research.microsoft.com/~ginav/ljmodeling.pdf+livejournal

Structure & Evolution of Blogspace
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1040000/1035162/p35-kumar.html?key1=1035162&key2=2165557111&coll=GUIDE&dl=ACM&CFID=45146885&CFTOKEN=60567333

the following were taken from a blog bibliography, which I have but do
not have a citation for--I know it's by someone with the e-mail
address lscheidt at indiana.edu--if you are this person I would love the
citation:

Kendall, Lori (2003). Diary of a Networked Individual: Interpersonal
Connections  on LiveJournal. Presented at the meeting of the AoIR 4.0,
Association of Internet  Research, Toronto Canada.

Lin, Jia & Halavais, Alexander (2004). Mapping the Blogosphere in
America. In  13th World Wide Web Conference. New York: The
International World Wide Web  Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the
Association for Computing Machinery  (ACM). Retrieved June 30, 2004
from  http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/www2004linhalavais.pdf.   
Abstract:  This short paper constitutes the first phase of a long-term
project  focused on probing American urban culture by examining the
hyperlinks and text  of personal weblogs. It discusses methods of
extracting geographic location  information from weblogs and ways of
indexing weblogs to city units. After a brief  introduction to the
broader research plan, the paper proposes a process to  automatically
extract geographic information from different weblogs. From both 
theoretical and practical perspectives, we will explain and justify
the rationale of  using 3-digit zip codes as units for comparing urban
cultures. A distribution of  American bloggers registered with
Livejournal and Diaryland, two popular blog  hosting services, will be
presented to demonstrate the geocoding of the  blogosphere, and to
compare the distribution of these two hosts in terms of 
concentrations of populations and demographic profiles. Finally, we
will discuss  how to further improve the indexing methods.

Paolillo, John, Wright, Elijah, and Mercure, Sarah (Feb., 2005). Mood,
Music and  Friends: Mapping the Culture of LiveJournal. Presented at
the meeting of the  Sunbelt XXV, International Network for Social
Network Analysis, Redondo Beach  CA.    Abstract:  LiveJournal is a
popular weblog/community hosting service with over  five million
predominantly young, female users from the US. Although reported  ages
range from 13 to 55, and users hail from 240 different counties, users
 nonetheless experience LiveJournal as having its own distinct
culture. How is this  culture created, and is it observable in the
posts and profiles of LiveJournal's  users?     To address these
questions, we collected a snowball sample of LiveJournal user 
profiles, containing information about users' interests and friends,
as selfreported and regularly maintained through a web form-based
interface. Principal  components analysis and hierarchical cluster
analysis were used to analyze the  interests and social positions of a
subset of users (approximately 10,000) for  whom complete information
was available. The results were visualized in a series  of reduced
sociograms, which were used as a guide to select representative  blogs
for qualitative content analysis.     The results reveal that there is
a highly-structured core of LiveJournal users with  well-defined and
contrasting sets of interests as well as a large periphery defined  by
sets of contrasting, but less coherent interests. Qualitative analysis
confirms  the existence of these groups, and shows them to be
correlated with off-line  subcultural styling (e.g. goth, punk, etc.).
Musical taste is the clearest correlate of  group membership, while
weak-tie channels of interaction relate the groups to  one another.   
 LiveJournal is thus a dynamic social market where youthful users
craft and  explore their public identities in ways that conform to
off-line social categories,  often through the commoditized world of
popular music. The mechanisms of this process are exposed through the
publicly-available profiles and posts of millions  of users of
LiveJournal and other weblog sites.

Raynes-Goldie, Kate (Dec., 2004). Pulling sense out of today's
informational  chaos: LiveJournal as a site of knowledge creation and
sharing. First Monday, 
9(12).http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/raynes/index.html.  
 Abstract:  The informational overload currently facing Western
society is  changing the way we understand the world as well as
rendering obsolete our  current ways of managing information and
creating knowledge. With these  changes in mind, I will examine the
blogging service LiveJournal as a new and more applicable way of
managing information and creating knowledge in today's  society.

-- 
Katherine Mancuso
academic, interrupted.
new e-mails (don't use sc dot edu)
personal: kmancuso at gmail dot com
professional: katherine dot mancuso at emory dot edu

Because long sig quotes are annoying, read mine below instead:
http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/writing/selflove.html
 
Anthropologists and labor unions allied: http://AAAUnite.blogspot.com
Orphan Films (22-26 March 2006, CFP): http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium
Social software research linkage: http://del.icio.us/museumfreak