A Tale of Two Virtual Communities: A comparative analysis of culture and discourse in two online programming communities

"Digital Sanctums of Empowerment": Exploring Community and Everyday Resilience Building Tactics in Online Professional Communities for Women

“…Content category derivation Akin to prior investigations that indicated an interweaving effect of informational and communal characteristics shaping conversational outcomes, the computational analysis outlined above also appears to indicate such a combined knowledge production process emerging in each of the three subreddits (Sengupta, 2021). While computational models constitute a powerful way of analyzing data at scale, these models remain limited in terms of being restricted to capturing only semantic characteristics and similarities that manifest in the data; thus, they may fail to identify deeply embedded nuance and contextual meaning (Podkorytov et al, 2021).…”

“…Since textual conversation is the primary mode of collaboration and knowledge construction in these online discussion channels, content analysis serves as a chief mechanism of inferring the community norms and conversational habits developed over time (Kou et al, 2018). Building on prior scholarship, our primary goal was to delineate the emergent habitus in these spaces based on the level of communal functions and collective affinity (Ren et al, 2012;Sengupta, 2021). In doing so, we categorized the data set into two types of conversational orientations -(1) Informational and (2) Communal, since these two dimensions have been highlighted in extant literature as the primary factors shaping emergent conversational perspectives depending on members' commitment and attachment to an online community (Haythornthwaite, 2009).…”

Virtual Vessels of Empowerment: Exploring Everyday Resilience Building Tactics in Online Forums Focused on Nurturing Professional Development of Women in Technical Domains

“…The anecdotal sharing based on personal experiences depicts a strong sense of fellow feeling, expressions of peer parity and overall commitment to the community (Sengupta & Semaan, 2021). Mechanisms of learning and knowledge sharing are fundamental to the construction and maintenance of social capital (Sengupta, 2021). Thus, a key underlying force in the creation of this online habitus of support and resilience building is the essence of instilling empowerment through social learning in the form of peer‐to‐peer knowledge sharing and gradual development of collective wisdom (Cummings et al, 2003).…”

“…Theoretically, this study contributes by applying a theoretical amalgam with the concept of the gender habitus serving as the primary lens, combined with frameworks on resilience building to navigate every day crises for historically underrepresented communities. On a practical and empirical level of contribution, these themes indicate ways in which such communities offer extended mentoring and can provide augmented support beyond institutionalized resources (Sengupta, 2021). Such resources can also provide extended peer support in times of crisis which can disrupt standardized work and learning practices (Aristeidou & Cross, 2021).…”

’A Guiding Light in a Virtual Haven’: A Preliminary Analysis of Conversations Around Navigating and Repairing Self-worth in an Online Professional Community for Women

“…To situate this analytical frame, we will explore the multiple, interdependent socio-technical aspects associated with such online discussion forums, a precursor to which is this initial exploration of conversational themes. Such an analysis can help inform the practices of platform governance and moderation work and also provide insights towards the way affordances of such channels can be designed [40].…”