Introduction Social Roles in Electronic Communities is an approach to studying online communities that views the roles of participants as primary determiners of community activity. Our approach is threefold: Study Communities Ethnographically. Through observation and analysis of many usenet newsgroups, we have developed a taxonomy of roles enacted online, which can be used to explain a variety of social phenomena. Computationally Analyze Roles. With our proposed roles as a starting point, we use statistical and computational linguistic methods to explore how roles can be discovered automatically. Designing For Roles. Understanding how roles impact communities, we develop interfaces and visualizations that give the user a feel for what community is like, what roles are enacted there, and what their effects are on the community as a whole. Contact: Scott A. Golder, MIT Media Laboratory, Sociable Media Group