IDA – Incel Data Archive: a multimodal comparable corpus for exploring extremist dynamics in online interaction. in Proceedings of CMC2023: 10th Conference on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Social Media Corpora.

Extremist online communities are rapidly growing locally, posing potential threats to European and non-European countries. To gain insight into the dynamics of interaction within these web-based extremist groups, we present IDA, the Incel Data Archive. IDA is a multilingual and multimodal corpus compiled from Incel forums in both Italian and English languages. With its collection of forums, blogs, and websites, the Incelosphere serves as an ideal case study for examining interaction dynamics within extremist online communities from a cross-cultural perspective. Therefore, our work makes a twofold contribution: firstly, it provides an original cross-cultural perspective on the Incel phenomenon, and secondly, it extensively discusses the challenges and opportunities encountered when constructing a multimodal and multilingual corpus from discussion forums. To achieve this, we employ a mixed-method approach to Computer Mediated Communication. In order to shed light on important differences between the two communities, we conducted an exploratory analysis based on a novel topic modeling technique based on Transformer architectures. This approach allowed us to delve into the themes present in the two corpora. The results of our thematic exploration demonstrate not only variations in the discussion topic favoured by each community but also differences in the targets of their hateful content.