Forum Communities Research Articles

Web mining and sentiment analysis of COVID-19 discourse in online forum communities

Recently, various discussions, solutions, data, and methods related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been posted in online forum communities. Although a vast amount of posting on COVID-19 analytical projects are available in the online forum communities, much of them remain untapped due to limited overview and profiling that focuses on COVID-19 analytic techniques. Thus, it is quite challenging for information diggers and researchers to distinguish the recent trends and challenges of COVID-19 analytic for initiating different and critical studies to fight against the coronavirus. This paper presents the findings of a study that executed a web mining process on COVID-19 data analytical projects from the Stack Overflow and GitHub online community platforms for data scientists. This study provides an insight on what activities can be conducted by novice researchers and others who are interested in data analysis, especially in sentiment analysis. The classification results via Naïve Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) have returned high accuracy, indicating that the constructed model is efficient in classifying the sentiment data of COVID-19. The findings reported in this paper not only enhance the understanding of COVID-19 related content and analysis but also provides promising framework that can be applied in diverse contexts and domains.

Community detection and social presence in students’ discussion fora

In Distance Education (DE) the importance of community is often emphasized, as according to many experts in the field, the strong sense of community among learners improves the quality of teaching and learning. In this study, we use the Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach to detect the communities formed in the collaboration networks created by the actors’ (students and tutors) interactions in the Discussion Fora of a Learning Management System (LMS), in a Distance Learning setting within an Open University. Data from the actors’ communications in two Module Discussion Fora (MDF) are selected for creating graphs and applying appropriate algorithms, the Girvan-Newman and the Louvain algorithm, to reveal the communities and analyze their synthesis. As Discussion Fora within LMSs enhance the formation of communities, our study intends to visualize the dynamic interactions that emerge in such environments and provide the Coordinators and the Tutors of the Modules with useful information to improve the students’ learning outcomes. Such knowledge is valuable, especially in DE, where there is a lack of daily face-to-face interaction of a typical classroom. Furthermore, as social presence is essential for successful online teaching and learning, the absence of forum communities or the loose participation in such communities, from both Tutors and students, should alert the Coordinators to make suggestions and effectively manage the discussions and interactions among learners.

Telegram as a Space for Peer-Led Harm Reduction Communities and Netreach Interventions

To date, studies of peer-led online harm reduction communities have focused on web forums, arguing that online spaces are strategic settings for both obtaining up to date information on substances and patterns of drug use and implementing new forms of outreach on the web. The present study analyzes the content and dynamics of a spontaneous users’ group on Telegram, where a team of peer workers was invited to intervene. The study’s aim was to learn more about people who use drugs’ communities on chat apps and provide insights to professionals wishing to implement harm reduction interventions in this type of environment. After obtaining the chat administrator’s permission, all content posted on the chat from March 1 to May 31, 2020, was analyzed adopting an abductive approach. It was found that peer-led communities based on a chat app are not very different from earlier web forum communities. The findings also show that the chat’s activity does not run counter to the public health perspective on drug use, provided that harm reduction is recognized and accepted as an important and effective strategy, and that people who use drugs are quite open to dialog and discussion with professionals who adopt the non-judgmental peer-to-peer approach typical of outreach interventions. Such an approach can be successful in gaining the attention and trust of people who use drugs, thereby boosting their spontaneous harm reduction attitudes.

Online student culture as site for negotiating assessment in medical education

Classic studies of medical education have examined how professional socialization reproduces the prevailing professional culture, as well as how students actively negotiate their place in educational processes. However, sociological research has not re-examined student culture in light of structural transformations in medical education, such as the introduction of new assessment types and their use as modes of commensuration. In this paper, we examine data from two studies of online forums where medical trainees and applicants to medical school discuss their experiences preparing for tests of professional skills, including judgment, empathy, and communication. Examining how medical students talk about these tests on such forums allows us to understand the meaning-making processes at work as students negotiate the commensuration processes such tests enable. We examine how these negotiations take place in online forums, where participants confront common challenges, form common perspectives, and share common solutions, all hallmarks of student culture. Through qualitative analysis, we find that online communities are spaces where students grapple with these new forms of commensuration, interrogate the standards and quantifications that underlie them, and collectively negotiate how to approach these assessments. Using the case of online forum communities, our findings advance past work on student culture in medical sociology by theorizing student culture as an extra-organizational phenomenon that spans multiple career stages. In so doing, we highlight the importance of online forum data for studying social processes.

IIDMCC: An Innovation Idea Discovery Model Using Online Customers Complaint Messages

<p>Online customers’ complaints have attracted increasing attention to innovation developers. By applying text mining and classification-oriented data mining techniques, an innovation idea discovery model using online customers’ complaint messages (IIDMCC) was proposed and implemented in this article. Methods included text mining to derive bags of words, sparsity exclusion to produce a term matrix, and supervised classification data mining to reveal decision rules. The IIDMCC showed 90.63% prediction accuracy based on 14720 complaint messages collected from official forum and online communities of a case company in the mobile phone sector from Taiwan. Validation of data inputs, method, and outputs was conducted via case company specialists. The article concludes that analyses of online complaint messages may potentially contribute to the exploration and discovery of innovation ideas. The paper demonstrates the use of mining open textual data in general and complaint messages in particular in the domain of knowledge discovery in databases.</p> <p> </p>

Differences in forum communication of residents and visitors in MOOCS

Facilitation of social interactions in Massive Open Online Courses can benefit from conceptualizing forum sub-populations through a networked lens. Such a lens implies that forum interactions represent a network of learners with heterogeneous levels of commitment to forum activity. A networked lens helps capture forum communities, so-called forum residents, as well as the rest of the crowd, also known as forum visitors. The current study empirically demonstrates the differences between these forum sub-populations. Building on a large dataset of manually labelled discussion threads in four edX MOOCs, our findings uncover two distinct patterns in the communication of posters with different length of forum commitment. As the courses progressed, all types of communication decreased for forum visitors, but both socio-cognitive and informational queries increased for forum residents. We find that the communication dynamics of committed forum posters cannot be observed when the entire forum population is examined in its entirety. Further, the study profiles learners around discussion type sequences. We show that communication topics of forum visitors appear narrow and topical when compared to the diversity of topics by resident posters. This paper offers a foundation towards the scaling of social teaching practices for personalised learning of both residents and visitors as well as community development in massive open online courses.

Language Alternation in Online Forums: English Monolingual Normativity and Multilingual Practices

Online discussion forums (ODFs), a type of computer-mediated communication (CMC), are sites of language use and multilingual practices where students communicate in web forum communities. There is limited research on the multilingual practices of students learning English for academic purposes (EAP) through ODFs. Drawing on discourse-centred online ethnography (DCOE) and discourse analysis, this article explores language alternation in one online university course. Students show agency by using languages in creative, multilingual ways when learning through technology. Although the course in question is an English language course, “semi-regulated” online discussion forums that allow language alternation and “networked” multilingualism promote peer and student-to-student interactions, resulting in fluid social relationships and challenging some of the norms of language education. Language alternation reveals the use of African languages and indexes both the expression of feelings and the cultural practices of these ODF communities. Universities are yet to implement multilingual online pedagogies that include the majority who do not speak English as a first language. Therefore, digital literacy and networked multilingualism are enabling multiple linguistic resources to challenge the “English-only” ideology.

The conventionalisation of mock politeness in Chinese and British online forums

While much cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis centres on difference because it is so often what is salient in miscommunication, we argue that we need to be more aware of similarity. Drawing on corpus-assisted discourse studies, we aim to uncover similarities in the pragmatic processes across two languages/cultures, more specifically, the shared developments in the conventionalisation of apparently polite forms for impolite functions used in British and Chinese forum communities within the last decade or so. The case studies which have been selected for analysis are 'hehe' in Chinese and 'HTH' [hope that helps] in British English. In both cases, these items had previously been identified as potentially mock polite through their presence in meta-discussions of im/politeness within the forums themselves. Our analysis shows how the items become pragmaticalised within specific contexts, while remaining unaffected in others, displaying both diachronic and synchronic variation in the degree of conventionalisaton of mock politeness which they express. The differentiation between the expected behaviours in different areas of the forms (collaborative or combative) and correlation with the mock polite usage also helps explain how it is that users orient towards the conventionalised meaning even when it is still relatively low frequency compared to polite usage, i.e. low frequency but high saliency.

Forum design and the changing landscape of crowd-sourced help information

The help documentation landscape has changed with the growth of various forms of social media. People now post how-to videos to YouTube, they write crowdsourced documentation for open-source software, and they participate in and draw from a wide range of help forums. These forums are a form of crowdsourced help information in which experts and amateurs come together to address questions and explain materials. While these online forums can be thought of as a threat to the roles of technical communicators, they also present opportunities for professionals to adapt their skills to new roles as "community managers" of professionally sponsored forums. This article examines that point by showing how communication design is important for developing online help forum communities. Through the analysis of ethnographic and interview data, the article covers different areas of design important for understanding help forums as networked forms of technical communication.

Navigating in the Virtual Mind of the Web’: the E-psychonauts’ Profiling

In the online drug forum communities there are some 'educated and informed” users who can provide somehow reliable information on psychoactive compounds/combinations. These users, also called 'e-psychonauts”, may possess levels of technical knowledge relating to a range of ”novel psychoactive substances“ (NPS). Our project aimed at identifying and describing what available in terms of the socio-demographic and psychological characteristics of e-psychonauts. An unobtrusive observational approach of a list of cyber drug communities (blogs, fora, Facebook ® and Twitter ® pages) was here carried out. The forum posts/threads were accurately reviewed, analysed and compared according to the presence of common clusters in order to obtain appropriate consistency/homogeneity levels. Data were collected in the time frame January- February 2014. Psychonauts typically considered themselves as ' psychedelic researchers”, new Shamans, ' philosophers” or ' alchemists”. They appeared here to be mainly young, males, unmarried, and Caucasians. They presented with good/excellent employment conditions and with a set of ‘key skills’, including: attention to the inner ‘soul’; high standards of knowledge about drugs’ pharmaceutical/chemical properties; high levels of both verbal fluency in reporting own drug experiences and of IT skills. The e-psychonauts seemed to perceive themselves as amateur chemists , sampling and at times synthesizing a range of drugs to achieve the state of consciousness they find most pleasurable. There is the need to improve both the existing levels of professional knowledge on this novel generation of drug misusers and to design/develop novel prevention approaches, able to ‘attract the attention’ of the e-psychonauts.

E-Psychonauts: Conducting research in online drug forum communities

Background“Legal highs” are becoming increasingly common features of the recreational drug market. The Internet has emerged as an important resource for technical and pharmacological knowledge in the absence of evidence-based literature, and for identifying emerging trends. Self-established drug-related Internet forums have emerged as particularly useful sources of information.AimsIt was the aim of this study to explore the key features of drug-related Internet forums and the drug forum communities.MethodsWithin the framework of the larger Psychonaut Web Mapping project, eight English-language drug forums were assessed, and key features, categories, themes and attributions were identified.ResultsThe results are reported taking into account ethical issues, such as anonymity and confidentiality, associated with research in online communities.ConclusionsThis study identified strong, unified and unique communities of recreational drug users that can provide an insight into the growing market in new drugs and drug compounds, and may be key components in future research, harm reduction and prevention strategies.

A social recommender mechanism for improving knowledge sharing in online forums

Nowadays, online forums have become a useful tool for knowledge management in Web-based technology. This study proposes a social recommender system which generates discussion thread and expert recommendations based on semantic similarity, profession and reliability, social intimacy and popularity, and social network-based Markov Chain (SNMC) models for knowledge sharing in online forum communities. The advantage of the proposed mechanism is its relatively comprehensive consideration of the aspects of knowledge sharing. Accordingly, results of our experiments show that with the support of the proposed recommendation mechanism, requesters in forums can easily find similar discussion threads to avoid spamming the same discussion. In addition, if the requesters cannot find qualified discussion threads, this mechanism provides a relatively efficient and active way to find the appropriate experts.