CHI 2007
2006 •· Work-in-Progress
April 28-May 3, 2007 • San Jose, CA, USA
On Context of Content: A Comparative
Methodology Review of How HCI and
Mass Communication Analyze Blogs
and Social Media
Lo Ping Wei
Abstract
Georgia Institute of Technology
Across contexts, researchers have most recently
applied content analysis –an unobtrusive scientific
method originated to draw social inferences from mass
media contents—to studying weblogs and social media
(WSM). In this paper, we look at the classic and
contemporary definitions of content analysis and
identify the methodology’s key premises and uses.
Against these premises and uses, we present findings
from individual methodology reviews of twelve WSM
studies involving content analyses by two disciplines –
Mass Communication and Human-Computer Interaction
(HCI). We cross-tabulate the individual reviews by
discipline, in terms of (1) what content-analysis
premises and uses were involved and (2) what research
inferences –from media contents to social contexts—
were made. We conclude with a collective comparison
of the Mass Communication and HCI approaches to
WSM and suggest one discipline complement the other
in analyzing the contents as well as in drawing inferences
on the user psychology and social behavior of WSM.
Atlanta, GA 30332 USA
loping@gatech.edu
Ellen Yi-Luen Do
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332 USA
ellendo@gatech.edu
Charles M. Eastman
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332 USA
charles.eastman@coa.gatech.edu
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2007, April 28–May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.
ACM 978-1-59593-642-4/07/0004.
Keywords
Weblogs (blogs), social media, content analysis, humancomputer interaction, mass communication, computermediated communication, social behavior, psychology.
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ACM Classification
H.5.3 Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Group and Organization Interfaces – evaluation/
methodology, web-based interaction. I.7.4 Document
and Text Processing: Electronic Publishing. J.4 Social
and Behavioral Sciences: psychology, sociology.
Introduction
Until their lately overlapping research subjects –mainly,
weblogs and social media (WSM), Mass Communication
and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have been
traditionally separate disciplines, each with own set of
research approaches and publication venues. Two
separate developments in research appear to contribute
to this ongoing cross-disciplinary convergence: (1)
research areas such as blogosphere vs. mediasphere,
the influence of weblogs on the media or/and the media
on weblogs, and, prominently, social psychology and
interaction that the media and weblogs help to shape
and engage are becoming foci for researchers across
disciplines [2, 4-8, 10-15]; and (2) content analysis,
from its earliest use in analyzing newspaper contents
by journalism and mass communication researchers to
infer media and society relationships, has evolved into
a major interdisciplinary research method utilized to
analyze all types of recorded communications [1, 3, 9],
including, most recently, computer-mediated social
communication contents such as emails and weblogs or
blogs. While the contents examined via content analysis
evolve, noticeably are the diverse natures of inferences
Mass Communication and HCI researchers attempt to
draw from the given contents to their contexts –
especially, in researching WSM (contents) and their
user psychologies and social behaviors (contexts).
A parallel search (using keywords “weblog” or “blog”,
“social”, and “content analysis” and publication years of
“2004-2006”) of the HCI literature on WSM in the ACM
(Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library
and the Mass Communication literature on WSM in the
AEJMC (Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication) and ICA (International
Communication Association) paper/publication archives
yields twelve articles investigating WSM, involving
content analysis as a primary method of inquiry [2, 4-8,
10-15]. Below, we first review the content analysis
method, its premises and purposes, as defined in
classic and contemporary communication research
literatures [3, 9]. We then conduct a comparative
review of each of the twelve WSM articles grouped by
their publication venues (ACM or AEJMC/ICA), in terms
of what content-analysis premises were emphasized
and what inferences were made. We draw our
conclusion based on a collective comparison of the role
of context between the Mass Communication and HCI
content-analysis approaches to WSM and their users.
Comparative review
This section (1) reviews generally defined premises and
purposes of the content analysis method, (2) reviews
each of the twelve articles rendered from the ACM and
AEJMC/ICA libraries/archives against the contentanalysis premises and uses identified in (1), and then
(3) cross-tabulates, based on the findings in (1) and
(2), how Mass Communication and HCI differently/
similarly apply content analysis to researching WSM.
Content analysis
PREMISES
Content analysts have cited two major definitions of
their methodology:
ƒ
“Content analysis is a research technique for
the objective, systematic, and quantitative
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description of the manifest content of
communication.” (Berelson 1952, p. 18) [3]
ƒ
“Content analysis is a research technique for
making replicable and valid inferences from texts
(or other meaningful matter) to the context of
their use.” (Krippendorff 2004, p. 18) [9]
Besides the five decades of evolution, the latter
(re)definition of content analysis elaborates from the
former with these distinctions:
-It elaborates that content analysis makes latent
inferences as well as analyzes manifest contents of all
types of texts that have some meaning to someone,
from artworks, images, sounds, symbols, artifacts, to
numerical records such as computer texts [9].
-It argues that contents have no objective readerindependent qualities, meanings speak to something
beyond the given contents in relation to particular
contexts, and specific inferences need to be drawn from
a body of texts (content) to their chosen context [9].
In essence, the premises of the classic and of the
contemporary content analyses, respectively, are
conceptually distinguished with different degrees of
emphases between:
ƒ
manifest content vs. latent content
ƒ
quantitative vs. qualitative
ƒ
objective vs. interpretative
USES AND PURPOSES
The classic and contemporary definitions of content
analysis also differs in categorizing the methodology’s
uses and purposes, with the former emphasizing
content while the latter emphasizing context:
-Berelson [3] orders the uses of content analysis under
three content-relative categories: (1) to discover
characteristics of content (e.g., trends, international/
intermedia differences, styles), (2) to identify/reflect
causes of content (e.g., intentions, group and individual
psychology and culture), and (3) to describe effects of
content (e.g., focus of attention, attitudes/behaviors).
-Krippendorff [9] categorizes content analyses as
context-sensitive in their uses and inferences in (1)
extrapolations (of trends, patterns, differences), (2)
measuring observations against standards
(identifications, evaluations, judgments), (3) indices
and symptoms (of presence/absence of a concept,
frequency of occurrence of a concept/co-occurrence of
two concepts), (4) linguistic re-presentations (of, e.g.,
social interaction, semantic network), (5) inferring/
reinterpreting conversations/interactions, and (6)
explaining institutional processes.
Although using different categorization systems, both of
the classic and contemporary definitions have
highlighted these three content-analysis uses/purposes:
ƒ
trends and differences tracing
ƒ
identifications (either/or inferences)
ƒ
social/cultural (re)presentation
Certain content analysis uses are notably more
emphasized by one definition than the other; they are:
ƒ
depicting attention, attitudinal/behavioral
effects (classic)
ƒ
explaining interactions (contemporary)
Naturally, computational uses such as the following are
included only in the contemporary content analyses:
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ƒ
computer-based indices
ƒ
semantic network analyses
Individual reviews
We conducted a full review
(http://www.coa.gatech.edu/phd/acme/weblogs/) of
the methodology contents of six Mass Communication
papers from AEJMC/ICA and six HCI papers from ACM,
against the content-analysis premises and uses/
purposes identified in the preceding section. The
subsections below summarize the findings of our full
review, coded based on the key terms of the identified
content-analysis premises and uses.
Mass Communication Papers
ƒ
Bortree, Presentation of self on the Web: an
ethnographic study of teenage girls' weblogs [4]: latent
content, qualitative, interpretative; social
(re)presentation, attitudes/behaviors, conversations.
Huffaker et al., Gender, identity, and language use
in teenage blogs [7]: manifest content, quantitative,
interpretative; trends, identifications, indices.
ƒ
ƒ
Marlow, Linking without thinking: social ties among
bloggers [10]: manifest content, quantitative; trends,
social (re)presentation, focus of attention, indices.
ƒ
Messner et al., The source cycle: intermedia
agenda-setting between the traditional media and
weblogs [11]: manifest content, quantitative; trends.
ƒ
Rains et al., A sign of the times: An analysis of
organizational members' email signatures [13]:
manifest content, quantitative, interpretative; trends,
identifications, social (re)presentation.
Trammell et al., Republic of Blog: examining Polish
bloggers through content analysis [15]: manifest
ƒ
content, quantitative, interpretative; social
(re)presentation, attitudinal effects, interactions.
HCI Papers
ƒ
Bar-Ilan, An outsider's view on "topic-oriented
blogging" [2]: manifest content, quantitative; trends,
interactions.
ƒ
Carter, The role of the author in topical blogs [5]:
quantitative/qualitative, manifest content; trends,
social (re)presentation.
ƒ
Chin et al., A social hypertext model for finding
community in blogs [6]: manifest content, quantitative,
interpretative; trends, indices, network analyses.
ƒ
Kelliher, Everyday cinema [8]: quantitative/
qualitative, manifest/latent contents, interpretative;
trends, attitudinal/behavioral effects, interactions.
ƒ
Qamra et al., Mining blog stories using communitybased and temporal clustering [12]: qualitative,
manifest content/latent content; trends, social
(re)presentation, semantic network analyses.
Schiano et al., Blogging by the rest of us [14]:
quantitative/qualitative, manifest/latent; trends.
ƒ
Summary
Table 1 summarizes how content analysis has been
applied in the Mass Communication and HCI research
on WSM based on our methodology review of twelve
studies against identified content-analysis premise and
uses. Our review indicates that quantitative analyses
of manifest contents were about equally (in frequency)
applied in both HCI and Mass Communication papers,
while qualitative analyses of latent contents were more
frequently used by HCI. In contrast, explicit uses of
interpretative procedures were more frequent by Mass
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Table 1. A methodology summary of the Mass Communication and HCI literatures on WSM using content analysis
Manifest
content
Mass Comm
Bortree
Huffaker
Marlow
Messner
Rains
Trammell
Subtotal
HCI
Bar-Ilan
Carter
Chin
Kelliher
Qamra
Schiano
Subtotal
Total
Latent
content
Quantitative
x
x
x
x
x
x
5
x
x
x
x
x
x
6
11
1
x
x
x
3
4
Qualitative Interpretative
x
x
x
x
x
x
5
x
x
x
x
x
5
10
1
x
x
x
x
4
5
x
x
x
x
4
x
x
2
6
Communication. As for purposes, content analysis was
used most frequently for trends tracing by both HCI
and Mass Communication. Social (re)presentation and
depicting attitudes/behaviors were among the next
most frequent uses of content analysis, with both of
them more utilized by Mass communication than by HCI.
Noticeably, this is consistent with the disciplinary
origination of Mass Communication from examining
communication processes and effects of mass media,
while that of HCI involving studying computer-mediated
interactivity that would be, instead, reflected in the
interaction/conversation uses of content analysis. Also
in our findings, three out of the four uses of interaction/
conversation occurred along with the uses of social
(re)presentation or/and attitudes/behaviors by the
same studies. This may suggest that the traditional
content-analysis premises of studying communication
Trends
Identification
x
x
x
x
x
x
4
2
x
x
x
x
x
x
6
10
(Re)
presentation
Attitudes/
behaviors
Interaction/
conversation
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
4
x
3
Indices/
Network
x
x
x
2
2
x
x
x
x
x
x
0
2
2
6
x
1
4
2
4
2
4
causes and effects as defined in the pre-PC/Internet era
can be summed up or possibly replaced by that of
interaction/conversation. Finally, indices/network
analyses were also among the most frequent uses by
two Mass Communication and two HCI studies. This
may implicate a general impact of the emerging
technologies on the two technology-related disciplines.
Discussion
The disciplinary foci of Mass Communication and HCI, in
general, were shown in different uses of the content
analysis methodology in studying WSM. While
interpretative procedures have been more emphasized
by Mass Communication, more HCI studies have looked
beyond manifest contents towards latent contents. As
WSM research moves beyond examining “face values”
and looks into deeper social meanings of blogs/blogging,
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Mass Communication and HCI can make best use of the
content analysis methodology by complementing each
other’s research practices. Quoting Krippendorff:
“scholars in different disciplines tend to place the same
texts in different contexts but rarely without
acknowledging that there are other readings, other
contexts, other worlds, within which given texts
function as well” (p. 33) [9]. A given WSM content
may be read differently when placed in different
contexts. The current review is limited in generalizing
its conclusion based on the sample of twelve studies,
while not intended to be a rigorous content analysis
itself that follows the precise methodology procedures
required by the content analysis method to achieve
research reliability and validity. This comparative
methodology review, nonetheless, is a pilot study for a
series of ongoing weblog and social media content
analyses and corresponding user psychology and social
behavior inferences across mass communication and
HCI contexts that will be presented in our future reports.
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
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