Exploring Virtual Communities with the Internet Community Text Analyzer (ICTA)

Abstract

The chapter presents a new web-based system called ICTA (http://netlytic.org) for automated analysis and visualization of online conversations in virtual communities. ICTA is designed to help researchers and other interested parties derive wisdom from large datasets. The system does this by offering a set of text mining techniques coupled with useful visualizations. The first part of the chapter describes ICTA’s infrastructure and user interface. The second part discusses two social network discovery procedures used by ICTA with a particular focus on a novel content-based method called name networks. The main advantage of this method is that it can be used to transform even unstructured Internet data into social network data. With the social network data available it is much easier to analyze, and make judgments about, social connections in a virtual community.