Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology [16] : researchers look at patterns in digital traces
that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to these traces and a growing number
of methods and tools to collect and analyse them make such analysis increasingly attractive. However, a researcher is faced
with the difficult task of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account,
and how the findings should be interpreted to say something meaningful about the community based on the traces of its members.
In this paper we present a framework that allows categorising digital traces of an online community along five dimensions
(people, documents, terms, links and time) and then describe a tool that supports the analysis of community traces by combining
several of them, illustrating the types of analysis possible using a dataset from a weblog community.
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11915034_125.