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<p>This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We find that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with different opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized.</p>
</abstract>

This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We find that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with different opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized.

The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Department of Information Science and Media Studies

Nordicom Review

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change....

Link from:	Criticizing non-sceptic	Criticizing sceptic	Endorsing non-sceptic	Endorsing sceptic	Neutral to non-sceptic	Neutral to sceptic
Sceptic post (79)	16	0	0	47	16	0
Non-sceptic post (13)	0	1	12	0	0	0

Link from:	Criticizing non-sceptic	Criticizing sceptic	Endorsing non-sceptic	Endorsing sceptic	Neutral to non-sceptic	Neutral to sceptic
Sceptic posts (0)	0	0	0	0	0	0
Non-sceptic posts (81)	0	1	54	0	26	0

The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Published Online: Jun 28, 2019

Page range: 65 - 78

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-0014

Keywords
blogs, climate change, polarization, link studies

© 2019 Dag Elgesem, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The functions of links from the first group of blog posts (frequencies)

The functions of links from the second group of blog posts (frequencies)

The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Published Online: Jun 28, 2019

Page range: 65 - 78

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-0014

Keywordsblogs, climate change, polarization, link studies

© 2019 Dag Elgesem, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The functions of links from the first group of blog posts (frequencies)

The functions of links from the second group of blog posts (frequencies)

Keywords
blogs, climate change, polarization, link studies