Multi-Level, Multi-Method Analysis of Communication Processes

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.

Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.

New media technologies help change the way in which organisation can take place; this can be studied through social network analysis and hyperlink network analysis, through corpus linguistics and semantic network analysis. The different entities which can be studied through these approaches – authors, language semantics, online resources, issues, and hyperlinks – can also be placed in relation to one another, of course.

One approach for doing this is through quantitative issue-based sampling: across organisational sectors, technologies and platforms, and types of relations (similarity, linking, co-publication, etc.); qualitative ethnographic and critical discourse approaches also come into play here.

For a study of discourse around homelessness, Amoshaun built a number of semantic fields encapsulating specific discursive themes (deviance, materiality, etc.); the prominence of these fields in continuing discourse can be tracked over time, for example. This can then also be combined with network analysis, both at the node level (what nodes are most central; who are important referents and brokers for specific themes, for example) and at the network level (how do specific areas of meaning cluster together; how do different networks compare to one another; what predicts links between organisations).

Such work is relevant for academics (for whom big data work is becoming increasingly important, and requires multi-level and multi-method analysis) as well as activists (for whom this improved understanding creates new opportunities for more effective advocacy).