Analysing user behaviour in internet communities

Yesterday Julia Preusse – who started her PhD studies at WeST just a month before I did – had a talk about her research interests. She is interested in communities and the behaviour of users in discussions. I thought she was having some interesting ideas. That is why I asked her for a meeting today. We sat down and discussed some of her ideas. While doing so it seemed that she liked my aproach to solve some of her problems.

After only 30 minutes of discussion we had a concrete roadmap for some interesting research on user behaviour in internet message boards. Of course I cannot talk about the concrete idea here – most part is Julias interlectual property and she has not published it yet – but the general idea is that we want to analyze the reply structure of users within topics in order to cluster the users to different groups. From there Julia wants to go to the next levle. We talked back with Dr. Thomas Gottron about our ideas and he seemed to be very happy with our approach.

Even though my focus is on social news streams I think Julias topics are very interesting and working with her together could also help me to gain a deeper insight on users behaviour for metalcon. That is why I will help her within the next weeks to work on these questions. I am excited to see the output and I will of course keep you updated on the topic. Of course I won’t forget to meanwhile work on my own research topics (-:

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Tags: collaboration, Information retrieval, PhD, why