Nia Week 4 - Literature Review

Mapping virtual communities by their visual productions: The example of the Second Life Steampunk Community.

This study presents the idea of mapping communities within Virtual World, specifically Second Life Steampunk community. Steampunk can be defined as a genre usually construed as re-enactment of a fantastical whimsical Victorian era.

This study presents that the height of virtual spaces has developed dramatically and inevitably virtual communities constitute presence and internal communities to accommodate these spaces. Furthermore, Cristofari and Guitton (2014) suggests in order for these communities to endure, there is presence, structuring and maintenance. Therefore ‘markers’ of identity can be implemented and can therefore identify which community they belong to.

By using Second Life Steampunk community as a model for research. Cristofari and Guitton (2014) attempts to, “…show how visual and lexical clues are used to construct the identity of a given virtual community, and the varying degrees of proximity that exist between different communities, through the analysis of the visual presentation of community-generated artifacts, the lexicon used in artifact descriptions, as well as the visual landscape of related virtual city. Comparisons with five other virtual communities made it possible to map their relationships on a multi-dimensional continuum.”

The method used in this model involved less subjective visual characteristics of the Steampunk community and five other communities, which were Victorian, Vampire, Medieval, Gorean and Star Wars. Corpuses of 400 items were collected from Steampunk and 200 from each other community. These items were collected using ‘Most relevant’ function of the search engine under key words Steampunk, Victorian, vampire, medieval and gor, with maturity ratings restricted to ‘general’ and ‘moderate’. Furthermore this study focused on non-archetypal characteristics as it carried an aesthetic purpose.

The results in terms of visual aesthetics found to be a large number of decorative characteristics for the Steampunk community. In comparison to that of medieval, gorean and star wars communities, had simpler functional aesthetics with limited decorative aspects. Moreover, three characteristics were common throughout all communities, which were glass, decorated surfaces and wrought metal. In terms of mapping communities the results were determined as follows. This diagram “…displays the highest sum (13.13) and was therefore considered the most likely representation of the relationships between those six communities.”

The most important lexical clue found from this study was foremost technology (565 words, 29.8%). This lexical analysis also showed greater importance in words related to Science, Time, Travel and Adventure. 

To conclude Cristofari and Guitton (2014) demonstrates “…that a community may be constructed without relying on offline social clues. Instead it can rely on the collective constitution of a distinctive aesthetics, shared – and thus identified and understood – by all its members.” Evidently this analysis of visual material produced by members of communities provides strong insight into how members identify their own community, insofar as what they perceive as belonging to it. In other words, identification and self-identication are crucial to the constitution of online communities.

The limitations of this study determine that not all characteristics of virtual worlds can be analysed using this same model. The reason for this is because some MMORPG oriented Virtual Worlds form some constraints within its formation, which differs from Second Life that provides variation of building artifacts and environment customization.

Reference

Cristofari, C., & Guitton, M. J. (2014). Mapping virtual communities by their visual productions: The example of the second life Steampunk community. Computers In Human Behaviour, 41374-383. Doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.017