A tale of two scholarly blog platforms: comparing and conceptualizing online research communities.

Cornelius Puschmann and Marco Bastos expand on the computational methods employed to understand the contributions and online networks of two prominent scholarly blog platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses. Their analysis suggests one community is driven more by an emphasis on the new media movement and cross-disciplinary aspiration, compared to the other’s more traditional disciplinary approach with a focus on the new publishing environment. The toolbox for analyzing blog platforms is still evolving and any results need to be treated with care. But it is clear that these computational methods can shed a new light on ongoing developments in science and scholarship.