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Book Chapter

Do user comments belong to journalistic articles? A brief visual history of user interaction on selected German and American news websites 1996–2024

  • Johannes Paßmann
  • Martina Schories
  • Paul Heinicker

The chapter reconstructs a brief history of online commenting, based on the position comments have to journalistic articles on news websites. Its key assumption is derived from paratext theory: Changes in spatial and temporal proximity of texts in the periphery of a main text––such as comments on the same web page as a journalistic article as compared to posts in a separate forum––indicate controversies over relevance of participants in a public discourse. Studying transformations of online comments is thus considered an access point to studying histories of public spheres. With help of a software the authors and colleagues developed, changes in commenting sections are traced and visualized. These changes are detected in a data sample of archived web pages provided by the Internet Archive.

  • Keywords:
  • commenting,
  • web archive,
  • paratext,
  • news websites,
  • user comments,
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Johannes Paßmann

Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany - ORCID: 0000-0002-2822-6082

Martina Schories

Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany - ORCID: 0009-0003-1322-5356

Paul Heinicker

Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany - ORCID: 0009-0001-7695-974X

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  • Publication Year: 2024
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Do user comments belong to journalistic articles? A brief visual history of user interaction on selected German and American news websites 1996–2024

Authors

Johannes Paßmann, Martina Schories, Paul Heinicker

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0413-2.20

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2024

Copyright Information

© 2024 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Exploring the Archived Web during a Highly Transformative Age

Book Subtitle

Proceedings of the 5th international RESAW conference, Marseille, June 2023

Editors

Sophie Gebeil, Jean-Christophe Peyssard

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

362

Publication Year

2024

Copyright Information

© 2024 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0413-2

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0412-5

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0413-2

eISBN (xml)

979-12-215-0414-9

Series Title

Proceedings e report

Series ISSN

2704-601X

Series E-ISSN

2704-5846

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