65 NORDICOM REVIEW Elgesem, D. (2019). The meaning of links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change. Nordicom Review, 40 (Special Issue 1): 65-78. doi:10.2478/nor-2019-0014. The Meaning of Links On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change Dag Elgesem Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway, Dag.Elgesem@uib.no Abstract This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We fnd that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with diferent opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized. Keywords: blogs, climate change, polarization, link studies Introduction Links are important as data in analyses of the social web (De Mayer, 2013). However, the social interpretation of links is highly context dependent and often underdetermined by the available data. Thelwall (2006) rightly pointed out that there can be no general theory of the semantics of hyperlinks, because the intentions behind the links can vary endlessly. The challenge, then, is to fnd methodologically sound ways to combine the analysis of patterns in the links with analyses of their functions. This article contrib- utes to the theme of this special issue on “making sense of big and small data as onlife traces” by analysing the functions of links in blog posts’ discussion of climate change. In particular, we investigate the role of links in the polarized discussion between those who accept and those who reject the idea of anthropogenic global warming. We fnd that most of the links are homophilic; that is, the function of the link is, in most cases, to endorse another blog, which shares the ideology of the linking blog. Furthermore, the