Experiences in Automating the Analysis of Linguistic Interactions for the Study of Distributed Collectives

An important issue faced by research on distributed collective practices is the amount and nature of the data available for study. While persistent mediated interaction offers unprecedented opportunities for research, the wealth and richness of available data pose issues on their own, calling for new methods of investigation. In such a context, automated tools can offer coverage, both within and across collectives. In this paper, we investigate the potential contributions of semantic analyses of linguistic interactions for the study of collective processes and practices. In other words, we are interested in discovering how linguistic interaction is related to collective action, as well as in exploring how computational tools can make use of these relationships for the study of distributed collectives.