With the wide adoption of instant messaging, online discussion forums, blogs and social networks, online communication has shifted from narration to highly collaborative discussions with multiple authors and discussion threads. However, the theories and methodologies for analyzing this new type of discourse which is different from narration, but also from dialogue, have remained mostly the same. The authors propose a new method for the analysis of this type of discourse, designed especially for multi-party chat conversations where parallel discussion floors and threads exist at the same time. The theoretical underpinning of the inter-animation framework is the detection of links between utterances in order to build a conversation graph that may be used to discover the discussion threads. The framework has been used for analyzing chat conversations of students in Computer Science in order to assess the involvement of each student, the inter-animation of the conversation and the degree of collaborative discourse.
Analyzing the Social Networks of High- and Low-Performing Students in Online Discussion Forums
