A Web-based System for Observing and Analyzing Computer Mediated Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a web-based system designed to systematically observe and analyze user activities on discussion forums, addressing challenges in data reusability and exploitation in computer-mediated communication research.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for building a generic, web-based system to track and analyze user activities across various asynchronous communication platforms.

Findings

System enables consistent data collection across different forums

Improves reusability and analysis of CMC data

Facilitates methodological research in online communication

Abstract

Tracking data of user's activities resulting from Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) tools (forum, chat, etc.) is often carried out in an ad-hoc manner, which either confines the reusability of data in different purposes or makes data exploitation difficult. Our research works are biased toward methodological challenges involved in designing and developing a generic system for tracking user's activities while interacting with asynchronous communication tools like discussion forums. We present in this paper, an approach for building a Web-based system for observing and analyzing user activity on any type of discussion forums.