Bouchard, Martin, Kila Joffres and Richard Frank. “Preliminary Analytical Considerations in Designing a Terrorism and Extremism Online Network Extractor.” In Computational Models of Complex Systems, edited by Vijay Kumar Mago and Vahid Dabbaghian, 171-184. New York: Springer, 2014.
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It is now widely understood that extremists use the internet in attempts to accomplish many of their objectives. In this chapter we present a web-crawler called the Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor (TENE), designed to gather information about extremist activities on the internet. In particular, this chapter will focus on how TENE may help differentiate terrorist websites from anti-terrorist websites by analyzing the context around the use of predetermined keywords found within the text of the webpage. We illustrate our strategy through a content analysis of four types of web-sites. One is a popular white supremacist website, another is a jihadist website, the third is a terrorism-related news website, and the last one is an official counter-terrorist website. To explore differences between these websites, the presence of, and context around 33 keywords was examined on both websites. It was found that certain words appear more often on one type of website than the other, and this may potentially serve as a good method for differentiating between terrorist websites and ones that simply refer to terrorist activities. Finally, the future developments of TENE are discussed. (Source: Publication)