Analysing ‘Super-Participation’ in Online Third Spaces

This chapter focuses on our attempts to overcome the methodological challenges of 'super-participation' in online discussion forums, focusing on the participatory patterns and discursive activity of what we call 'super-participants'. Our principal contribution in this area (Graham and Wright 2013) focuses on the www.moneysavingexpert.com (MSE) discussion forum. It is one of the largest forums in the United Kingdom and has received nearly 30 million posts. Until recently, the forum (and broader website and email list) was owned by the finance guru and campaigner Martin Lewis. We used a large-scale quantitative content analysis that covered all of the users, alongside a detailed qualitative, hand-coded content analysis. While smaller in scale, this still required a large number of posts to be analysed, and this raises its own challenges. In this chapter, we first discuss why active minorities (that is, super-participants) are typically framed negatively by reviewing the normative frameworks commonly used to analyse online political talk. Second, we present a typology for identifying and categorising super-participants, a framework that can be used to conceptualise super-participation in online forums. Third, we explain and describe the methods that we developed for analysing super-participants. As relative novices to the scraping of data, we explain some of the challenges that we faced, as well as how we eventually overcame them. We then outline our qualitative approach and provide some methodological insight for future research on super-participation. Finally, we discuss the methodological implications of our work.