Stan Ruecker, Sara Dorow, Heather Jiang, Zachary Devereaux and Christopher Moore co-wrote this one. The full title of their paper is “Shallow, narrow, deep and wide: issue crawling for Chinese adoption.” [vz: a bit confused as to what this means. Intriguing, though.] All authors are from the University of Alberta, with the exception of Zachary Devereaux who is from Ryerson/York University. The paper was presented by him and Christopher Moore.
ZD shows us hyperlink analysis maps, which he proposes are textual maps.
IssueCrawler: server-side webtool, created by the Govcom.org Foundation in Amsterdam. Crawling, as in spider robots that take as starting points the websites you’re interested in exploring. The example issue is adoption of Chinese children by people all over the world, particularly in the US and Canada.
To launch the crawl, the researcher sets the number of iterations of method (how far the crawler goes – how many websites) and depth (how deeply within each site the crawler explores). We go on to a demo of the adoption crawl (a shallow one – two sites out, two levels deep). Many .gov/.ca sites with factual information, and .com/.org sites with much more personal accounts (“pink and fuzzy,” they say, especially since 95% of Chinese children who get adopted are girls), acculturation tips, etc. Not very many Chinese sites in there, although there are some in the larger network. Third crawl is deep and wide: 2 iterations out, 3 levels deep, with legend: considered by research team as the most representative network map. Shows a “strong” inner network; presence of professional, resource, and secondary activities for adoptive families (consumer/charity/cultural). Highlighted is the Association for Research in International Adoption.
The researchers’ chosen topic highlights that it’s possible to hyperlink-analyze from a censored and uncensored point of departure, see the differences easily.
Conclusions:
– websites in this context represent dynamic and interactive hypertext.
– the result is an interactive and informative set of dynamic maps that aid analysis of the online presence of the communities in question.
– future research: cross-platform content analysis of network, as well as its different instantiations over time.
