Socio-Semantic bubbles of internet communities
SOCSEMICS aims at developing a set of integrated, groundbreaking methods to address the possible existence of so-called “filter bubbles” in the digital public space. In all generality, this phenomenon may be construed as communities whose actors are more or less prone to interaction and open to informations coming from “outside” of these communities. SOCSEMICS will contribute to the formalization and operationalization of this question by addressing three current challenges: (i) developing a comprehensive theory of reinforcing and self-sustaining socio-semantic communities by appraising the social, semantic and socio-semantic realms simultaneously, (ii) drastically improving content analysis by replacing classical distributional approaches with clause analysis, and thereby enabling quantitative analyses which render the linguistic complexity of utterances in web corpuses, (iii) fostering the interface between these methods and qualitative approaches, especially through a couple of broad case studies, together with the development of interactive platforms implementing the above innovations and facilitating digital social research.