Hi Stefania, I am already impressed - 200 websites is a phenomenal amount of content.. We have also been struggling with this problem in our research community and would be interested to know what you turn up. So far, the difficult issues we have discussed have been: 1) freezing/archiving the state of the websites; or more generally how one deals with change. this can range from a very difficult problem if the website you are using is database-driven and/or constantly updated (like a news website) or it can be more simply a problem of how you download and reference what exists. Participants on this list have raised questions about IPR (ie the legality of copying), but I think the argument has been forcefully made that this can be considered fair use. If, on the other hand, your website contains the archived postings of members of the public and you want to analyse their content, you are getting into a whole different ethical kettle of fish. 2) documenting the structure of the website (ie its links) as a part of its content. How should this be done? Then in terms of analysis, understanding the place of each web page relative to the whole site. for example, in most sites the home page gets by far the lion's share of the hits. Is it therefore appropriate to analyse the homepage in depth and subsidiary pages in less depth? I guess only your theoretical framework can tell ;-) 3) understanding the visual design of the website with reference to its content. 4) understanding the place of the website with regard to the rest of the web, ie with link analysis or search term analysis... I think if you just wanted to scrape text from each page and then run it through, say, Atlas.ti to generate word lists or do a more traditional content analysis such as is applied to media texts, then that could be done. But I do think some of these other issues might arise anyway. Elizabeth On 11 Jul 2005, at 13:03, <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi,
I am working on protest group online communication (thanks to the endless list of suggestions on this mailing list, I started using HTtrack!) and I am content analysing some 200 websites.
So far, I have found quite a fragmented literature on content analysis of the Web. Would you flag out any specific work?
Thanks! stefania
Stefania Vicari PhD student in Sociology University of Reading PO Box 218, Reading, RG6 6AA, United Kingdom.
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Elizabeth Van Couvering PhD Student Department of Media & Communications London School of Economics and Political Science http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vancouve/ e.j.van-couvering@lse.ac.uk