SSNA Key concepts

To understand and do Social Semantic Network Analysis, you will need the following concepts:

Primary data: the corpus of interview transcripts, posts and comments on an online forum or blogging platform etc. Primary data are generated by the informants.

Secondary data: the corpus of ethnographic annotations and codes on the primary data. Secondary data are generated by the ethnographers.

A contribution is a testimony in written form (interview transcript, post on an online forum, etc.). Each contribution is a datapoint of the study's primary dataset.

A code is a keyword that an ethnographer associates to a snippet of a contribution.

An annotation is an entity that contains both a snippet of a contribution and the code that the snippet is associated to.

For a more detailed discussion of the data model underpinning SSNA, see this paper.