Design of the Cogno Web Observatory for Characterizing Online Social Cognition

摘要

It is important to occasionally remember that the World Wide Web (WWW) is the largest information network the world has ever seen. Just about every sphere of human activity has been altered in some way, due to the web. Our understanding of the web has been evolving over the past few decades ever since it was born. In its early days, the web was seen just as an unstructured hypertext document collection. However, over time, we have come to model the web as a global, participatory, socio-cognitive space. One of the consequences of modeling the web as a space rather than as a tool, is the emergence of the concept of Web observatories. These are application programs that are meant to observe and curate data about online phenomena. This paper details the design of a Web observatory called Cogno, that is meant to observe online social cognition. Social cognition refers to the way social discourses lead to the formation of collective worldviews. As part of the design of Cogno, we also propose a computational model for characterizing social cognition. Social media is modeled as a "marketplace of opinions" where different opinions come together to form "narratives" that not only drive the discourse, but may also bring some form of returns to the opinion holders. The problem of characterizing social cognition is defined as breaking down a social discourse into its constituent narratives, and for each narrative, its key opinions, and the key people driving the narrative.