Politics, Christianity and Culture in the Polish Internet

Structural differences

Albert HupaInstitute of Applied Social Sciences, Warsaw University

WWW communities

• Based on the structure of links a set of sites that have more links (in either direction) to members of the community than to non-

members, Flake et al 2000

a guest is more likely to visit other members of this community rather than others,

Ackland, Gibson 2004

• Based on semantic cohesiveness – a topical based communities a collection of web pages sharing the same topic, Toyoda, Kitsuregawa 2001

every topic consists of authoritative pages, possessing most definitive knowledge and of hubs,

Kleinberg 1999

a bipartite core, i.e. consisting of two sets of nodes, in the which all the nodes from one set link to

the other, Kumar et al 1999

Community within a discourse• Discourse: communication act sharing the same patterns of:

Interactions Linguistic contents Structure of informationTopic community is a set of web pages heavily linked together

inside a given discourse.

Discourse does not constitute a Community!

Question

• Is the structure of communities connected with the nature of a discourse?

• Research areas: Politics Christianity Culture

Web Mining

• „Reaper” - topical driven crawler written in Perl and SQL basing on a seed and key words.

• Mining Algorithm – snow ball• Networks of most central domains:• Vertex: domain with 200 pages• Arc: number of directed links

PoliticsSeed: 26 web sites of major political parties

Key words:

absolutory, administration, agrarism, anarchy, antisemitism, apartheid, authority, bureacracy, bolshevism,

charisma, Christianity, decolonization, democracy, doctrine, dyctature, egalitarsim, elite, fascism,

federation, ideology, privilidge, integration, Catholic Social Teaching, Catholicism, society, class,

coalition, communism, colonialism, conservatism, constitution, corporation, radio, television, jury,

culture, legitimization, left, right, liberal, machiavelissm, monarchy, moral, national, state, nazi, nazism,

responsibility, ombudsman, oppoistion, society, parliament, party, patriot, pluralism, subject, politics,

polity, population, law, president, trial, promulgation, leader, ministry, reform, republic, rewolution,

spokesman, governance, trial, sejm, senat, senat, appeal, socjal, democracy, socialism, socjalist, society,

sovereignty, communication, totalitarism, tribune, bill,, utopy, rule, choice, assembly, community.

Christianity

Seed: 17 major Christian portals (Catholics, radical Catholics, liberal Catholics, traditional Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Catholicism)

Keywords: God, saint, Jesus, ewangely, church, life, Leonard, Ecumenism, Chrys, law, commentary, word, John, religion, Tomas, Christianity, man, Juda, Benedict, day, year, history, people, Vinci, code, Paul, pope, question, marriage, faith, Bible, book, shop, theology, Poland, service, truth, death, Mary, Satan, fact, great, word, prayer, shroud, Ratzinger, radio

Culture• Seed: 7 major cultural portals• Key words: news, party, festival, stars, concerts, contests, projects,

meetings, tour, workshops, review, album, banns, dvd, books, mp3, clips, media, Internet, press, radio, forum, coverage, interview, biography, lyrics, galery, pop, alt, rock, metal, heavy metal, club, literature, theatre, archive, architecture, music, culture, film, sculpture, portfolio, comics, opera,

Formal categorization• A multi topic portal – a big site on various topics, allowing different communication

services, such as blogs, forums, newsletters, and so on, possessing an internal search engine

• A single topic portal – the same kind as a web portal, but focusing on one kind of a topic

• A news site – a site focusing on one kind of topic, not offering any communicational services, with the domination of dynamic content and an internal search engine

• A static page – a site offering (mostly) static information on an institution, topic, hobby, etc, but not on persons.

• A blog – a site with dynamic content being sorted from the newest to the oldest• A personal website with a blog• A personal website without a blog• A forum• An E-shop• A link directory

Describing a discourse• self consciousness

density & transitivity

• pluralism small reciprocity

• uniformity high reciprocity

• stratification variety of possible clustering

• authority stratification centralization link distribution

• individualism Domination of blogs and

personal pages

• collectivism Domination of institutional

sites, portals and news sites

• Passive communication Lack of communication

software

• Interactive communication domination of communication

software

Politics

Politics

Politics Right Wing

PoliticsLeft Wing

Politics Samoobrona

Christianity

Christianity

Christianity – cluster network

Christianity – common sphere

Christianity Ecumenists and Protestants

ChristianityCatholics

ChristianityRationalists

Culture

Culture

Culture

CultureBlogosphere

CultureHigh culture

Culture Cinema

CulturePhotography

Conclusions

• Antagonistic discourseNodes inside clusters are dense, reciprocal and triadici.e. self consciouss, collective and balanced

• Dialogical discourseNodes inside clusters are sparse, less reciprocal and less balancedi.e. Self consciousness relates to the discourse, not clusters

• Individualistic discourseSparse, static, plural