[Air-L] Previous Research on YouTube Comments?

[Stuart Shulman]

At QDAP, in collaboration with personnel at the Smithsonian, we are using
Context Miner (http://contextminer.com/index.php) to harvest comments about
climate change videos on YouTube for classification classification using the
Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT - http://pcat.qdap.net/).

It turns out these two free software pieces work well together, but, we are
having to make adaptations to better leverage the meta data in the manual
annotation process. Decontextualized comments from YouTube are very tough to
code without following a complete thread though start to finish.

It seems, in this early stage of the research, that one must be fully
immersed in the cross-references between commenters to make any sense of it
at all.

Do list members have thoughts on this? Our friends at the Smithsonian are
interested in finding out what, if anything, contributes to a 'better' or
'worse' online discussion about the future of the earth. Should we ever
expect serious deliberation in such a space?

~Stu


On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt at gmail.com> wrote:

> To anyone that can provide sources,
>
> I am looking for any previous work analyzing the YouTube commenting system,
> or research on comments in a similar online space where the commenting
> system is not the primary function of the space (eg., how YouTube is videos
> > comments). Any help is appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
>
> ---
>
> Alexander Leavitt
> Research Specialist, Convergence Culture Consortium
> Comparative Media Studies, MIT
> http://doalchemy.org
> Twitter: @alexleavitt
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-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
200 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003

http://people.umass.edu/stu/
stu at polsci.umass.edu
413-545-5375

Editor, Journal of Information Technology and Politics
http://www.jitp.net

Director, QDAP-UMass
http://www.umass.edu/qdap/

Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government
http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/