CommunityThroughPictures

This research project is focused on a set of online communities where commmunication between participants takes place through a highly visual medium--webcam portals. Portals are set of pages where participants can submit small, low resolution images that they can update at will. The project is concerned with developing a methodology for analyzing the community behavior. Visual content analysis is much too complex and time consuming for such a large community. I am using a social network analysis to determine high-level community affiliation and a technical analysis to validate assumptions about community behavior formed over the 2+ year span of a larger investigation into webcam portals, interactions and practices.