[Air-L] Downloading online forum postings and analyzing occurence of keywords in the data

[Patrick Williams]

Hi Koen,

I don't have any experience with scraping software, but I recently did a
keyword analysis as part of a study of ethno-nationalist interaction on a
Transylvanian forum. I used Wordsmith
5<http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version5/index.html>.
It had a bit of a steep learning curve, but it was recommended by a corpus
linguist and was quite efficient once I understood how it worked.

I have a short paper partly based on using Wordsmith from a corpus
linguistics (methodological) perspective and its relevance for
microsociology (i.e., symbolic interactionism) in case you're interested.

Best,

patrick.


On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Leurs, K.H.A. (Koen) <K.H.A.Leurs at uu.nl>wrote:

>
> Dear list-members,
>
> I'm a Utrecht University based (Netherlands) researcher working on the
> European http://www.mignetproject.eu/ project working on transnational
> digital networks, migration and gender.
> More specifically I'm studying knowledge and education processes across
> formal (university) and informal (forums, wikipedia) knowledge domains.
>
> I was wondering if anyone on the list has experiences with scraping online
> forum data and searching it for the occurence of keywords. Especially I'm
>  wondering which software best suits my preferences, in selecting for
> instance a certain timeline to scrape as I would like to compare the
> curriculum of a year of university courses
> and their attention for diversity issues and a year of forum postings and
> their attention for diversity issues.
>
> Scraping software that I have used so far are:
> Wget
>
> Software that I have been looking at for searching keywords in digital data
> are:
> Provalis Research Wordstat
> NVivo
> Digitalmethods.net > issuecrawler
>
> I'm looking forward to any suggestions, and thank you for your time.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Koen.
>
>
> Koen Leurs | Aio / PhD student Gender Studies  |  Research Institute for
> History and Culture  |
>  |  Utrecht University, the Netherlands  |  Muntstraat 2a  | 3512 EV
> Utrecht  |  Room 1.12  |
>  www.koenleurs.net  |  www.uu.nl/wiredup | www.mignetproject.eu/ |
>
>
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-- 
Patrick Williams, Ph.D.
http://www.jpatrickwilliams.net