BROG

Last updated

BROG is the acronym for (We)blog Research on Genre, [1] a project based in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. [2]

Contents

The BROG project is an informal research collaboration dedicated to the conduct of empirical, social science research on weblogs. Founded and directed by Susan Herring, [3] a professor of Information Science at Indiana University and established researcher of computer-mediated communication, its past and present members include faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars at Indiana University.

BROG is best known for an article published in January 2004 entitled, "Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs", which applied content analysis methods to a random sample of 203 blogs and characterized blogs as an emergent genre of computer-mediated communication. This article received the 2004 "Best Blogged Paper" Edublog award and is often cited in scholarship about blogs. A Google Scholar search indicates that it had been cited 677 times as of March 3, 2012.

History

BROG was founded in February 2003 for the purpose of conducting a genre analysis of blogs at a time when very little research on blogs was available. The project's findings were first presented at the Association of Internet Researchers [4] conference in Toronto in October 2003. Since then BROG has expanded its focus to include research on gender, visual design, audience, and interconnectivity of weblogs. Since 2004, the project has made extensive use of Social Network Analysis methods and network visualizations.

Controversy

The presentation of BROG's research at the 2003 AoIR conference generated controversy among some bloggers who were present at the conference and others who were not about whether people who were "not bloggers" (two of the four original BROG members kept blogs at the time) could legitimately conduct research on blogs. Concerns were also expressed by some bloggers about the research's empirical, quantitative approach. Some critics expressed the view that this approach (which showed blogs to be less interlinked and conversational than was popularly believed) missed important aspects of the blogging experience.

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.

A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats with Turtle currently being the most widely used notation.

The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can publish their opinions.

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.

RDF Schema is a set of classes with certain properties using the RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies. It uses various forms of RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF resources. RDF and RDFS can be saved in a triplestore, then one can extract some knowledge from them using a query language, like SPARQL.

The Mormon blogosphere is a segment of the blogosphere focused on issues related to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The term "Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the Latter-day Saint blogging community as a play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; however, not all Latter-day Saint-themed bloggers like or use the name Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Latter-day Saints themselves.

Weblogs, Inc. was a blog network that published content on a variety of subjects, including tech news, video games, automobiles and pop culture. At one point, the network had as many as 90 blogs, although the vast majority of its traffic could be attributed to a smaller number of breakout titles, as was typical of most large-scale successful blog networks of the mid-2000s. Popular blogs included: Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW, Joystiq, Luxist, Slashfood, Cinematical, TV Squad, Download Squad, Blogging Baby, Gadling, AdJab, and Blogging Stocks.

SPARQL is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium, and is recognized as one of the key technologies of the semantic web. On 15 January 2008, SPARQL 1.0 was acknowledged by W3C as an official recommendation, and SPARQL 1.1 in March, 2013.

FOAF Semantic Web ontology to describe relations between people

FOAF is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is a professor of Computer, Cognitive and Web Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Constellation, a multidisciplinary research institution within RPI that focuses on the study of theories, methods and applications of the World Wide Web. Her fields of expertise include interdisciplinary data integration, artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust.

RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

An edublog is a blog created for educational purposes. Edublogs archive and support student and teacher learning by facilitating reflection, questioning by self and others, collaboration and by providing contexts for engaging in higher-order thinking. Edublogs proliferated when blogging architecture became more simplified and teachers perceived the instructional potential of blogs as an online resource. The use of blogs has become popular in education institutions including public schools and colleges. Blogs can be useful tools for sharing information and tips among co-workers, providing information for students, or keeping in contact with parents. Common examples include blogs written by or for teachers, blogs maintained for the purpose of classroom instruction, or blogs written about educational policy. Educators who blog are sometimes called edubloggers.

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.

N-Triples is a format for storing and transmitting data. It is a line-based, plain text serialisation format for RDF graphs, and a subset of the Turtle format. N-Triples should not be confused with Notation3 which is a superset of Turtle. N-Triples was primarily developed by Dave Beckett at the University of Bristol and Art Barstow at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (NLP) and ETL, the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge or the generation of a schema based on the source data.

Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages. Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results about a certain topic of interest. It is a part of the semantic web project, which aims to make document mark-up codes more readable and meaningful to both humans and machines.

Susan C. Herring is an American linguist and communication scholar who researches gender differences in Internet use, and the characteristics, functions, and emergent norms associated with language, communication, and behavior in new online forms such as social media. She is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, where she founded and directs the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication. In 2013 she received the Association for Information Science & Technology Research Award for her contributions to the field of computer-mediated communication. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Herring also founded and directed the BROG project.

Health blogs are niche blogs that cover health topics, events and/or related content of the health industry and the general community.

Multimedia studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic discourse focused on the understanding of technologies and cultural dimensions of linking traditional media sources with ones based on new media to support social systems.

References

  1. "BROG | the (We)blog Research on Genre Project". www.blogninja.com. Archived from the original on 23 August 2006. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  2. "Home". slis.indiana.edu.
  3. Susan Herring
  4. "Home". aoir.org.