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Understanding Digital Ethnography: Socio-computational Analysis of Trending YouTube Videos

Authors:
Muhammad Nihal Hussain
Kiran Kumar Bandeli
Serpil Tokdemir
Samer Al-khateeb
Nitin Agarwal

Keywords: YouTube; digital ethnography; USA; GB; social network analysis

Abstract:
The online video sharing website - YouTube, which was launched in February 2005 to help people share videos of well-known events, has rapidly grown to be a cultural phenomenon for its massive user-base. According to Alexa, the web traffic monitoring tool by Amazon, YouTube is the second most popular website globally. Still there is a lack of systematic research - both qualitative as well as quantitative - focusing on the video-based social networking site as compared to other social media sites. Video comments serve as a potentially interesting data source to mine implicit knowledge about users, videos, categories, and community’s interests. In this research, we studied top 200 YouTube videos trending daily for a 40-day period separately in the United States of America (USA) and the Great Britain (GB) regions. We collected data for 7,998 videos trending in the USA throughout the 40-day time period and 7,995 videos trending in the GB regions. We studied content engagement behavior of users in the USA and GB regions by analyzing views, likes, dislikes, and comments on the set of trending videos. The study helped us glean some of the digital ethnographic behaviors of the users in these two regions. This paper presents highlights of the similarities and differences observed in such behaviors between the USA and GB regions.

Pages: 21 to 26

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: October 14, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-673-6

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 14, 2018 to October 18, 2018