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Exploring the Dark Side of the Web: Collection and Analysis of U.S. Extremist Online Forums

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Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3975))

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Abstract

Contents in extremist online forums are invaluable data sources for extremism reseach. In this study, we propose a systematic Web mining approach to collecting and monitoring extremist forums. Our proposed approach identifies extremist forums from various resources, addresses practical issues faced by researchers and experts in the extremist forum collection process. Such collection provides a foundation for quantitative forum analysis. Using the proposed approach, we created a collection of 110 U.S. domestic extremist forums containing more than 640,000 documents. The collection building results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach. Furthermore, the extremist forum collection we created could serve as an invaluable data source to enable a better understanding of the extremism movements.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zhou, Y., Qin, J., Lai, G., Reid, E., Chen, H. (2006). Exploring the Dark Side of the Web: Collection and Analysis of U.S. Extremist Online Forums. In: Mehrotra, S., Zeng, D.D., Chen, H., Thuraisingham, B., Wang, FY. (eds) Intelligence and Security Informatics. ISI 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11760146_67

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11760146_67

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34478-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34479-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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