Betweenness Centrality of Singapore Blogosphere 2008. Contains 1239 nodes.
The Singapore Political Blogosphere: What form of Public Sphere?
My research is situated within the wider framework of the internet being the greatest force for democratisation the world has ever seen (Pitrodi, 1993), and at the same time another means for disseminating propaganda, fear and intimidation (Rodan, 1997). I analyse the discourses and styles of discourse of the Singapore political blogosphere. Starting with an event in 2006 and extracting a corpus of 29 blog posts, I ask ‘which blogs are the keyplayers?’ and ‘what discourses and styles of discourse appear in the Singapore political blogosphere?’ The blogosphere in question is isolated from the global blogosphere and clearly demarcated according to Hurst (2006) and Yu-Ru Lin et al. (2006). I have targeted blogs using social network analysis uncovering the keyplayers of the Singapore political blogs with higher levels of ‘closeness centrality’ and ‘betweenness centrality’ (Nooy et al., 2005). An exploratory analysis of the position that the non-democratic nature of Singapore society shapes the development of online public spheres. It questions whether the internet engenders democracy or the dissemination of propaganda, fear, and intimidation.
The Beginning of the Current Project
Issue Crawler results for the Singapore Socio-political blogs from July 2006 to July 2007. Now the results contain blogs and certain sites that did not appear in the original list, this is because of how the parameters below were set when running the crawl. The sites may not link directly but are are indrectly connected because of a co-outgoing or incoming linked site.
The larger the circular representation the larger the number of links.
The more central the site then the more central the site is to the overall social network.
Parameters
Date: 26 Jul 2007
Number of iterations: (2)
Crawl depth: (2)
Co-link analysis by: (page)
Privileged starting points: (on)
An interactive version is operational and available by clicking on the image above [or the link marked 'svg' below] so long as you have downloaded the svg viewer plug-in at http://www.adobe.com/svg. For SVG info, see: http://www.svgi.org/. (Windows users are advised to use Internet Explorer. Windows users who use Firefox exclusively should see this svg plug-in information: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/windows-all.html#AdobeSVG. Firefox users should install the beta SVG viewer plug-in. “Native” SVG in Firefox does not work well with issuecrawler maps.)
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And for those of you remotely interested there is a detailed account of the various considerations and decision processes involved in The Issue Crawler: The Makings of Live Social Science on the Web by Richard Rogers
