Fashionista Comments

My project was a coding of comments in response to the "best dressed" threads on the website fashionista.com. I coded 100 comments in regards to 11 weeks of posts. My goal was to figure out how the posters on a fashion website interact and if they cultivate any patterns or form any sort of community. I coded for a variety of factors, some of which did not yield significant results when put in a graph. The factors that were significant were positive/negative comment, and the user the comment was directed at. The above graph shows direction of comments, with green representing both positive and negative sentiments, red as positive, and blue as negative.

I concluded that users with the first or second post in response to a thread had more interaction with other posters, as they received more direct responses. The topic of conversation was very specific and stayed consistent. There is a small community of fairly consistent users on this site, but no noticeable hierarchy or relational ties amongst users. The comments were mostly positive, with only 2/11 weeks having more negative responses. Also, negative comments were usually made in conjunction with a positive comment. There was less discussion of specific designers; the focus was more on the idea of "style."

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