Content-Based Social Network Analysis of Mailing Lists

vides tools to examine relationships between people. Text Mining (TM) allows capturing the text they produce in Web 2.0 applications, for ex-ample, however it neglects their social structure. This paper applies an approach to combine the two methods named “content-based SNA”. Us-ing the R mailing lists, R-help and R-devel, we show how this combination can be used to de-scribe people’s interests and to find out if au-thors who have similar interests actually com-municate. We find that the expected positive relationship between sharing interests and com-municating gets stronger as the centrality scores of authors in the communication networks in-crease