Communities of Interest-Interest of Communities: Social and Semantic Analysis of Communities in Infrastructure Discussion Networks

AbstractThe process of public consultation for planning and construction of sustainable urban infrastructure requires a bidirectional communication among as many stakeholders of the project as possible. In modern infrastructure projects, social web and online social media play an important role in involving citizens through what is referred to as "microparticipation." However, the social network which is formed behind the scene of microparticipation is usually ignored by both researchers and practitioners. This article combines community detection in social networks with information retrieval methods, to detect and label communities of project followers and cores of interest in the network of urban infrastructure project stakeholders. We study dynamics of the network and its communities by monitoring them over time. This technique is used to analyze followers of a Light Rail Transit LRT project in microblogging website Twitter and profile them based on their interests and ideas they support. Although methods of this article can be readily applied to other cases where connectivity of project followers and their descriptions are retrievable, our work is mainly interested in how to analyze Twitter discussions without any assumption that they replace the other online or offline means of public involvement in infrastructure projects. This article is an extended version of a conference paper that appeared as Nik Bakht & El-Diraby, 20132.