City as commons: Study of shared visions by communities on Facebook

Abstract

The present article is an exploratory exercise of analysis of texts present in digital social networks organized by communities that operates on urban public spaces. This text present some ideas about civic and political participation to support our point of view of "expanded participation" provided by social interactions throughout social networks digital platforms. We intend to improve our knowledge about how groups are sharing visions by analyzing a words network created from those interactions. We try to characterize relationship between words used in posts in Facebook pages from two groups, one in Italy and other in Brazil. This work analyzes networks and relations, from this point, it is possible identifying in most important word pairs, words with higher centrality metrics and the main idea expressed in the content of posts and discussions. Finally we discuss possibilities and difficulties found in the usage of this kind of tool. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.