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Semantic networks of interests in online non-suicidal self-injury communities
People who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) often conceal their practices, which limits examination and understanding of their engagement. The goal of this research is to utilize data from public online social networks (namely, LiveJournal, a major blogging social networking site) to observe the NSSI population in a naturally occurring setting. Specifically, the focus of this paper is the interests publicly declared by LiveJournal users. In the course of study, we collected the self-declared interests of 25,000 users who are members of or participate in 139 NSSI-related communities. We constructed a family of semantic networks of interests based on their similarity. The semantic networks are structured and contain several dense clus-ters—semantic domains—that include NSSI-specific interests (such as self-injury and razor), references to music performers (such as evanescence), and general daily life and creativity related interests (such as poetry and friendship). Assuming users are genuine in their declarations, the clusters reveal distinct patterns of interest and may signal keys to NSSI.
Semantic Networks of Interests in Online NSSI Communities
Persons who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), often conceal their practices which limits the examination and understanding of those who engage in NSSI. The goal of this research is to utilize public online social networks (namely, in LiveJournal, a major blogging network) to observe the NSSI population’s communication in a naturally occurring setting. Specifically, LiveJournal users can publicly declare their interests. We collected the self-declared interests of 22,000 users who are members of or participate in 43 NSSI-related communities. We extracted a bimodal socio-semantic network of users and interests based on their similarity. The semantic subnetwork of interests contains NSSI terms (such as "self-injury" and "razors"), references to music performers (such as "Nine Inch Nails"), and general daily life and creativity related terms (such as "poetry" and "boys"). Assuming users are genuine in their declarations, the words reveal distinct patterns of interest and may signal keys to NSSI.
DIGITAL HEALTH, 2020
Objectives #selfharm has been blocked by Instagram, but manoeuvring hashtags (e.g. #selfharn) are beginning to appear in order for secret non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) communities to communicate. The purpose of this study was to (a) determine the nature of the #selfharn conversation on Instagram, (b) analyze common properties of the visual content (i.e. images and videos; n = 93) tagged with #selfharn, and (c) discover what kind of environment the authors ( n = 50) of #selfharn were creating. Methods A multi-method approach was utilized for this study. Netlytic was used to generate a text and content analysis to examine the authors’ captions and comments ( n = 8772) associated with #selfharn (collected over a seven-day period). Results After removing #selfharn from the dataset, the text analysis revealed that #depression ( n = 3081) and #suicide ( n = 2270) were the most commonly used terms associated with #selfharn. Overall, 52% ( n = 4386) of the popular words/phrases related wi...
The social semantics of LiveJournal FOAF: Structure and change from 2004 to 2005
2005
Social Network Analysis methods hold substantial promise for the analysis of Semantic Web metadata, but considerable work remains to be done to reconcile the methods and findings of Social Network Analysis with the data and inference methods of the Semantic Web. The present study develops a Social Network Analysis for the foaf:knows and foaf:interests relations of a sample of LiveJournal user profiles. The analysis demonstrates that although there are significant and generally stable structural regularities among both types of metadata, they are largely uncorrelated with each other. Also there are large local variations in the clusters obtained that mitigate their reliability for inference. Hence, while information useful for semantic inference over user profiles can be obtained in this way, the distributional nature of user profile data needs closer study.
Analysing Meso and Macro conversation structures in an online suicide support forum
ArXiv, 2020
Platforms like Reddit and Twitter offer internet users an opportunity to talk about diverse issues, including those pertaining to physical and mental health. Some of these forums also function as a safe space for severely distressed mental health patients to get social support from peers. The online community platform Reddit's SuicideWatch is one example of an online forum dedicated specifically to people who suffer from suicidal thoughts, or who are concerned about people who might be at risk. It remains to be seen if these forums can be used to understand and model the nature of online social support, not least because of the noisy and informal nature of conversations. Moreover, understanding how a community of volunteering peers react to calls for help in cases of suicidal posts, would help to devise better tools for online mitigation of such episodes. In this paper, we propose an approach to characterise conversations in online forums. Using data from the SuicideWatch subred...
2006
The objective of this study was to examine the situation created by personal blogging on LiveJournal, a popular blogging platform, specifically how the actions of friending (creating a link between two separate LiveJournals) and commenting (leaving a message on a particular LiveJournal post) affect the presentation of self and creation of community. It was found that traditional assumptions of the dangers of the internet to obscure identity affected the respondents little if any, instead they seemed to prioritize the promise of relationships with other users that mimed traditional off-line friendships. As seen in media such as Kornblum 2005 "Lying online is easy."; Silverblatt in Billhartz 2005; Cassidy 2005 in the distinction between Facebook and Friendster/MySpace; Dateline's Predator series; Noguchi 2005; also Lindlof and Shatzer discuss the particular consequences of this for scholars.
Writing for Friends and Family: The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs
This research explores variables related to the use of personal-journal style blogs for interpersonal goals. A random sample of bloggers completed surveys exploring how the combination of extraversion and self-disclosure affect strong tie network size, which in turn serves as motivation to use blogs as an alternative communication channel. Bloggers who exhibit both extraversion and self-disclosure traits tend to maintain larger strongtie social networks and are more likely to appropriate blogs to support those relationships. Age, gender, and education have no relationship to network size, blog content, or the use of blogs as a relationship maintenance tool. These results contribute to the continuing discussion about the impact that the Internet and its tools are having on relationships by suggesting that, rather than promoting isolation, computer-mediated communication tools such as blogs often function to enhance existing relationships.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 86% of Internet users living with a disability or chronic illness have looked for health information online (Fox, 2007). And while so-called e-patients often start this search for information, many find themselves led to communities that provide this and more, such as Tu Diabetes, an online social network site.” This pause in what can seem like an endless search for answers may be one that health professionals can gain insight from. Such extended pauses may give insight into the values of this particular community. This article provides the results and analysis of a study using ethnographic methods and rhetorical analysis to examine the texts posted by members of the social networking site Tu Diabetes in order to discern the values held by this community.