Poster:

Participation in online communities has become a significant part of many people’s lives due to the popularity of forums, social media, and other types of community websites and applications. With this participation comes a wealth of data in the form of not just textual information, but a large assortment of metadata, depending on the community platform. This data could be useful to a variety of parties: From community members interested in better understanding the dynamics of their favourite online hang–outs, to community moderators wishing to identify potential problem members, to marketers looking to identify the best times of day of verbal phrasing to appeal to a particular group of online users. However, the abundance of the data can act as a double–edged sword: With so much data generated every day, users may have difficulty identifying key patterns in user communication trends. In this paper I present Visualizing Reddit: a visualization–based interface I developed to help users identify communication patterns in online communities based out of Reddit.com. I discuss the unique capabilities of Visualizing Reddit for accessing a variety of metadata from a six–month timespan, as well as the design decisions that informed my development