Modeling the Social Practices of Users in Internet Communities

As the Internet has become widely accessible mailing list servers are being used increasingly to support collaborative discourse in scholarly communities. The majority of these communities are open and new users may join who have met few, if any, of the other list members, and come to know them primarily through email discourse. However, new members joining the discourse of an established group may have difficulty calibrating their constructs with those of the existing members, particularly since the disciplinary background of members may not be evident and may vary widely. Major misunderstandings can arise because members use the same term with different technical meanings, or use different terms for the same construct. This article provides a framework for modeling the conceptual structures of members in an Internet community and describes web-based tools that can be used by members to develop models of the social practices of other users in the community and to calibrate their own use of terminology and constructs against those of others.