Themes in French Political Blogging during 2009

Milwaukee.
The final speaker this morning at AoIR 2009 is my PhD student Tim Highfield, who focusses on the French blogosphere and uses much the same methodology as in our joint paper. His work focusses on a dataset of French blog and mainstream news media posts from some 450 sites throughout 2009, and out of this identifies what events and topics are driving discussion. Sites in his sample were identified through searches on relevant search engines as well as on specialist blog aggregators such as the French Linkfluence.

Overall, this particular study, which focusses on blogs, now takes in some 23000 posts from 148 active blogs over 221 days, out of some 165,000 posts when you also include the mainstream news media. Because the French political environment is multi-party, these blogs cluster into a number of groupings, rather than just a broad 'left' and 'right' category.

There were a number of major events (political and otherwise) that show up in Tim's dataset - for example, the Obama inauguration, the political upheaval in Madagascar, the Air France flight 447 crash in the Atlantic, etc. Tim's also providing an overview of overall posting patterns (with more analysis yet to be done when we get more detailed data) - there are clear weekly patterns, and a nice long tail in terms of blogger activity.

The first case study in Tim's presentation is the Obama inauguration: the days around the 20th of January saw above-average blogging activity, but he was far from the only topic being discussed - domestic French topics remained at the centre of French bloggers' attention, too (and the term président appeared frequently because of Sarkozy as well as of Obama.

Another notable period is the discussion on the anti-Internet piracy HADOPI law during April to June 2009, which was at first rejected by the National Assembly, then approved by the Assembly and the Senate, and then rejected again by the Constitutional Council. Here, there was some blog coverage of the law, but strong focus remained on the president (in April) and on the upcoming or just-passed European elections (in May and June), so what emerges from this is that HADOPI remains a peripheral concern.

President Sarkozy appears as a central theme here partly also because of a number of Sarkozy-focussed watchblogs, Tim notes, and 'Europe' is a similarly problematic term because it covers such a broad range of issues. One further aim for this study, then, is to refine the Leximancer analysis of these data to develop a sharper image of what is happening in the French political blogosphere.

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