Social Ties in Video Sharing Services: Tactics for Excavating Virtual Settlements

The paper explores excavation as a metaphor or conceptual lens for gaining insights into social formations and cyber-structures enacted in video sharing virtual settlements. The emphasis is on conditions for virtual excavations, techniques which could be used to support them as well as their analytical value to making sense for academic, business-related or other purposes of what people do online. Two case studies are used to provide baseline data for framing the notion of digital remains or traces of virtual settlements, the form they take in today's social web and the means through which they are revealed and made sense of using knowledge visualization techniques. It turns out that virtual excavations organized around cultural artifacts of practice can serve as 'gold mines' for business intelligence, providing a means for understanding, not only structural properties of 'social' technologies and the way in which they are appropriated, but also dynamic aspects of the enacted cyber-structures resulting from recurrent co-engagement in practice and online collaboration.