The goal of this paper is to present an innovative methodology to exploit user generated content as a data source for sociological research. The methodology will be presented by discussing a specific research case study project. The discussed research project goal is to describe the role of media contents in the construction of generational identity through a two step question. May specific media-products get user generated generational discourses started? If so, may those discourses be used to investigate the shared generational we sense?

1. Analysing User Generated Content for social science Generational “we sense” in the Italian blogosphere Luca Rossi - Giovani Boccia Artieri LaRiCA / University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”

2. persistence/ easy to search/ addressed to an unknowable audience/ easy to replicate/ (boyd 2007) Growing availability of User Generated Content: wesearch/ scenario

3. wesearch/ methodology   Keywords Identification Through 5 focus groups we’ve identified 45 media products to be used as keywords to investigate online discourses

4. wesearch/ methodology    Query strings definition a) Avoid unwanted responses (spam) b) Obtain the full text of every blog entry (yahoo pipes) c) choose between chronological or “by relevance” output

5. Storage of blog entries and retrieval of authors’ information a) Incremental storage of RSS entries b) Scraping of authors’ information wesearch/ methodology    supported platforms: Blogger ITA / ENG Flickr ENG Il Cannocchiale ENG Libero ITA Splinder ITA Windows Live Space ENG YouTube ENG

6. Summary of collected data starting set of keyword: 45 retrieved blogs entries: 3000 cases with authors’ data: 928 wesearch/ methodology  

7. media&generation/ research Is it possible to use ugc to observe the emergence of the generational discourse? [ world-wide, media based, generational wesense (Edmunds, Turner 2005) ] May specific media products get user generated generational discourses started?

8. media&generation/ conclusions Media products are anchors for personal memories which can be used in an individual or a generational way.

9. media&generation/ conclusions “ I chose to start the nursery class. My nursery-syndrome and the fact that I watched Candy Candy when I was a child, made me choose this university degree ” (F. female 25 years old)

10. media&generation/ conclusions “ And we who are in the age of 30’s, we belong to the Tiger Mask generation, we can’t change it […] We had good times, watching cartoons and TV series that left their mark. ” (A. male 32 years old)

13. http://mediageneration.wordpress.com [email_address] [email_address] http://www.soc.uniurb.it/larica