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Publications - Abstracts: Bridging the Divide in Democratic Engagement: Studying Conversation Patterns in Advantaged and Disadvantaged Communities Abstract
The Internet offers opportunities for informal deliberation,
and civic and civil engagement. However, social
inequalities have traditionally meant that some communities,
where there is a concentration of poverty, are both less likely to
exhibit these democratic behaviors and less likely to benefit from
any additional boost as a result of technology use. We argue that
some new technologies afford opportunities for communication
that bridge this divide. Using temporal topic modeling, we
compare informal conversational activity that takes place online
in communities of high and low poverty. Our analysis is based
on data collected through i-Neighbors, a community website that
provides neighborhood discussion forums. To test our hypotheses,
we designed a novel time series segmentation algorithm that
is driven by topic dynamics. We embed an LDA algorithm in
a segmentation strategy and develop an approach to compare
and contrast the resulting topic models underlying time series
segments. We examine the adoption of i-Neighbors by poverty
level, and apply our algorithm to six neighborhoods (three
economically advantaged and three economically disadvantaged)
and evaluate differences in conversations for statistical significance.
Our findings suggest that social technologies may afford
opportunities for democratic engagement in contexts that are
otherwise less likely to support opportunities for deliberation
and participatory democracy.
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