Dear list

I have written an article on research on online communities, partly based on theoretical considerations, partly based on the framework I have developed in my personal research on political debates online.

It was meant to be a part of a book but for various reasons the book project did not come true. Now I am searching for a suitable journal and are asking you for suggestions. I believe I have provided a strong methodological contribution to the field of studies of online communities. Although my research framework was fitted to analyze political debates it will be easily usable for studies of all sorts of online communities.

I enclose the abstract and keyword list and I will be very happy for suggestions for publication possibilities.

All the best,

Jakob

Jakob Linaa Jensen

ph.d.-scholar, Dep. of Political Science, University of Aarhus

Bartholins Allé, 8000 Aarhus C., Denmark

Phone +45 20867777

E-mail: jakob.linaa@ps.au.dk

Webpage: www.netdemocracy.dk and www.linaa.net

Abstract:

Online or virtual communities is one of the phenomena affiliated with the rise of the Internet that has attracted the most widespread attention. In the article I argue that the study of online communities ought to include all the different aspects of the phenomenon and therefore a broad range of methods is necessary. I outline three aspects of online communities which have to be studied in order to get a comprehensive picture of community life: communication, participants and relations.

I address the related methods available for each aspect, content analysis, online surveys and quantitative online tools. I focus mostly on the content analysis of communication as I emphasize communication as the most important aspect of community life. Finally, I give an example of such s study taken from my own research on political public spheres online.

Keywords:

Online communities, content analysis, web surveys, Internet studies, methodology.