seeing through social networks [is52026b social computing - week 3]

8/3/2019 Seeing Through Social Networks [IS52026B Social computing - week 3]

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by Choconancyl on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

IS52026 Social ComputingWeek 3: seeing through social networks

What is a social network?we use social network to describe a platform but it'sreally a social formation


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the rise of social networking sites has surfaced thefact that offline social networks are alreadyfunctioning in all parts of our lives and society

by Marc_Smith on Flickr - Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Social network analysisthrough algorithmsnetwork analysts rely extensively on the use ofmathematics and graph theory.

"[f]rom the outset, the network approach to the studyof behavior has involved two commitments: (1) it isguided by formal theory organized in mathematicalterms, and (2) it is grounded in the systematicanalysis of empirical data."http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Papers/Kavada.pdf
http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Pahttp://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Pa


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e- ~bTd)FIGURE 3.1

A NodeXL social media network diagram of relationships among Twitter users mentioning thehashtag "#WIN09" used by attendees of a conference on network science at New YorkUniversity in September 2009. The size or each user's vertex is proportional to the number oftweets that user has ever made.2 November 2011 Copyright 2011, Elsevier Inc. All rights Reserved 3

Social n etw orks an alysis pro po ses th at social b eh avio rand processes should be "exp la ined w ith referenceto netw orks of social re lations that link actors or"nodes".

The unit o f analysis can be an ind ividual person , agroup, an organization or even the w hole of 'society ',as "any entity that is connected to a network of o thersuch en tities w ill do "netw ork analysts contend that "the structure ofrela tions among actors and the location of ind iv idualactors in the netw ork have im portant behavioral,p ercep tual, an d attitu din al co nsequ en ces b oth fo rthe individual un its and for the system as a whole"http: / /nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Pape rs /Kavada . pdfThe m aths and the d iagram s go hand-in-handcan support in tu ition , can also m islead ...
http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Paphttp://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Pap


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Copyright 2000-2011, Valdis Krebs - see http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html

SNA basics - see http://www.orgnet.com/sna.htmlDegree CentralityBetweenness CentralityCloseness CentralityNetwork IntegrationBoundary SpannersPeripheral PlayersOnline networks provide huge volumes of data forsocial network analysis
http://www.orgnet.com/sna.htmlhttp://www.orgnet.com/sna.htmlhttp://www.orgnet.com/sna.htmlhttp://www.orgnet.com/sna.html


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FIGURE 15.8

This NodeXL wiki network graph shows a well defined outer ring of users and astrong inner core. Only a handful of vertices connect the outer ring to the innercore. Without these nodes, the population would be highly fragmented.

2 November 2011 Copyright 2011, Elsevier Inc. All rights Reserved 5


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Quizmaster Phil Nice was identified by south-east Londonresidents as somene who was good at bringing peopletogether. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

RSAhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/15/big-society-community-networks'Big society' facilitators are found within communities

Phil Nice runs a popular Monday night quiz at a pub insouth London that is famed locally for its speed cake-eating contest, audience participation (in return forchocolates), and anti-north London jokes. Nice has alsobeen named by a respected thinktank as a potential keyplayer in building David Cameron's much-discussed "bigsociety". It is all down to his well-connectedness.

A quarter of the 280 people they talked to could not nameanyone in their social network they thought was good atbringing people together or could help them contactsomeone with influence, power or responsibility tochange things locally.


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Figure 3' People who have a connection to local inf luence despite beingunemployed or reti red have more local connections in generalIsolates group Non-isolates group

F ig ur e 3 k ey : Em ployedo Studento 'Other' occupationo Retired U nem ployedo N o s ta tu s g iv eno Named 'Other'

Figure 3This f igur e is t he s ame as Figure 2, onlythe nodes have been sized according to theirScriild

http://www.thersa.org/projects/connected-communities/power-lines

Sain sburys ... connecting the isolatesThe RSA w ill spend the next year feeding back thefindings published in Connected Communities toresidents, and help ing them to design and testinterventions based on these netw orks to addressloca l p roblems .

B ut w hat w ill be the "bridging capital" that fosterslinks betw een New Cross G ate's m iddle-classresidents up on Telegraph Hill and poorer residentsin areas around the tube station?MA people - gaia marcus w ill be doing a couple ofsandbox sessions
http://www.thersa.org/projects/connected-communities/power-lineshttp://www.thersa.org/projects/connected-communities/power-lines


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The Egyptian Revolution on Twitter

VIDEO mubarak twitter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gu KJfvq4u I&feature=related

by panisson on youtubeData collected with Gephi Graph Streaming.This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with thehashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of theannouncement of Mubarak's resignation. If you retweetedsomeone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that yourusername is in this network.

The data were collected through the Twitter streaming and searchAPls by Andre Panisson, and is part of a research projectinvolving the Computer Science Department of the University ofTurin (www.di.unito.it). the Complex Networks and SystemsGroup of the lSI Foundation (www.isi.it). and the Center forComplex Networks and Systems Research of Indiana University(cnets. indiana.edu).You can find other similar videos about dynamic networks analysison http://www.youtube.com/user/truthyatindiana
http://www.youtube.com/watch?http://www.youtube.com/user/truthyatindianahttp://www.youtube.com/user/truthyatindianahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?


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#Sidibouzid Twitter Hashtag: an analysis of the people spreading the newsGilad Lotan http://giladlotan.com

Tunisiaifikrahttp://giladlotan.com/blog/2011/01/sidibouzid-twitter-hashtag-an-analysis-of-the-people-spreading-the-news/
http://giladlotan.com/http://giladlotan.com/


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D.-E'fJE ! 10-3'"E

102D is ta nc e [ km ]

Figure 3: Probability of friendship between two users as afunction of their geographic distance for the three datasetsunder analysis. The two straight lines represent probabilityP(d) ~ d-ct with two different exponents a =0.5 anda=.0.

hUp://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/-ss824/pub/papers/icwsm2011_sociospatial.pdf

Socio-spatialremember the numbers. Now the networks.W e discuss how distance still matters: individualstend to create social ties with people living nearbymuch more likely than with persons further away,even though strong heterogeneities still appearacross different users.

In fact, we discover how about 400/0 of socialconnections between users are shorter than 100km,

http://www.syslog.cl.cam.ac. u k /2011/07 /15/socio -s pati a l- p ro pe rties-o f -0n line -soc ial- netwo rks/
http://hup//www.cl.cam.ac.uk/-ss824/pub/papers/icwsm2011_sociospatial.pdfhttp://www.syslog.cl.cam.ac./http://www.syslog.cl.cam.ac./http://hup//www.cl.cam.ac.uk/-ss824/pub/papers/icwsm2011_sociospatial.pdf


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Networks of Trust

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From Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Social capital http://en.wikipedia.org/wikilSocial_capitalRobert Putnam: social capital "refers to the collective value of all 'social networks'and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.""A growing body of research has found that the presence of social capital throughsocial networks and communities has a protective quality on health"."David Halpern argues that the popularity of social capital for policymakers islinked to the concept's duality, coming because "it has a hard nosed economicfeel while restating the importance of the social." For researchers, the term ispopular partly due to the broad range of outcomes it can explain"expresses a fear that in modern society the important stuff that holds communitiestogether is going down the pan ...this is 'seeing through social networks'"Here, social capital is another tool in the armoury of the elite, deployed to ensurethat the 'wrong' kind of people don't enter their circles"(Bourdieu, 1986, 1992).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikilSocial_capitalhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wikilSocial_capital


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by muckster (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Anticategorical imperativehttp://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Papers/Kavada.pdfThe main thread of criticism concerns the inadequate conceptualizationof human agency and culture. In that respect, network analysis isoften criticised for its structural determinism, which "neglectsaltogether the potential causal role of actors' beliefs, values, andnormative commitments" (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1425).Instead, it produces network 'snapshots' of social structure throughtime, paying insufficient attention to the historical mechanisms whichdominated their emergence.Another problem of social network analysis is "[t]he abstruseterminology and state-of-the-art mathematical sophistication" whichseems "to have prevented many of these "outsiders" from venturinganywhere near it.White's seminal contributions and considers networks as "crucialenvironments for the activation of schematas, logics, and frames""White (1992) considered discursive "narratives" and "stories" to befundamental to structural pursuits, writing that "stories describe theties in networks" and that "a social network is a network ofmeanings" (Ibid). "
http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Papers/Kavada.pdfhttp://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Papers/Kavada.pdf


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Confus ion ...

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WORLD MAP OF SOCIAL NETWORKSJune 2011

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c re di ts . U in m nz o C o s en za www.uincos . i t

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hUp:llwww.headshift.com/our-blog/2008/10/26/solving-real-world-problems-thl

kozarac.ba,The town of Kozarac was ethnically cleansed in 1992and of the 24,00 mostly Bosniak citizens whosurvived, most were scattered around the world,republika serpskareturnees set up an online community, internetcentres and other media that provide a forum forthe town to connect with the diaspora around theworldInitially, there were several related sites, butKozarac.ba has emerged as the main forum and ithttp://www.headshift.com/our-blog/2008/10/26/solving-real-world-problems-th/


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ilI l deeha re

From 'Reboot9: Kozarac.ba' on slideshare by Lee Bryant (CC BY-ND 2.5)

O verall, th is is a study of how virtual community cansom etim es help overcom e imm ense structuraldam age to real-world networks in the physicalrealm.But Kozarac.ba has also overcom e another kind ofstructural hole in the netw orks that form thecommunity. Central to the techniques of ethn iccleansing in th is area was the idea of elitic ide,


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ilI l deeha re

From 'Reboot9: Kozarac.ba' on slideshare by Lee Bryant (CC BY-ND 2.5)

th is self-funded fire service has gone from strength tostrength, and the local Serb authorities have beenforced to give them offic ial recognition. They stickto their princip le that "the only enem y is fire", andthere is no such thing as a Serb fire or a Bosniakfire, and as a result they are w inning fans evenam ong surrounding Serbian towns who wouldotherw ise have little do to w ith Kozarac. This isqu ite an ach ievem ent to say the least.


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# Focus on the users primary activity - goals, activities, tasks.Goals are the end conditions people are striving for. Activitiesare the tasks people do to achieve their goals e.g for netflix theflow would look something like this - entertainment - rentingmovies - rating, adding to queue, discussing movies. It acts as aclear and consistent method for organising feature-set ideas.

# Identify social objects, these objects mediate social activities.Discover these objects and the interactions around them, theycan be real life like Facebook, or the Amazon wish list - or theycan be jobs and dates, projects and events. Give the socialobjects a URL - this makes objects sharable, easier to find &refind, and allows users to link directly, search engines like them.

# Choose core feature set. Joshua Porter calls this finding yourverbs. It is the idea of selecting what actions are associated withthe noun - eg videos = play, stop, edit, store, upload, share,comment, embed.http://www.nikhilk.net/Reading-Designing-for -the-Social-Web. aspx
http://www.nikhilk.net/Reading-Designing-forhttp://www.nikhilk.net/Reading-Designing-for


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PO STE L ;;;:5~EB 52

Photo credit: Jon Postel


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DARPA challengehttp://web.mit.edu/press/2009/darpa-challenge-1210.htm IThose who directly found one of the 10 balloons were offered$2,000, with the remaining $2,000 going to charity. Butaccording to team members, the key to their success wasalso rewarding those whose input directly helped to find theballoons. If, for example, you invited the person who actuallyfound the balloon to join the network, you would receive$1,000, with $1,000 going to charity. The person who invitedyou would receive $500, and so on. In addition to themonetary rewards, the system also allowed all participants tosee their direct impact on the social network.The Media Lab team assembled its strategy in only four days.It launched a Web site on Thursday, December 3, andenlisted close to 5,000 participants in just 48 hours. By 6:52pm on Saturday, December 5-only 8 hours and 52 minutesafter the contest began-the team had located all 10 of theeight foot-by-eight-foot balloons, which were tethered to theground at various locations from coast to coast.
http://web.mit.edu/press/2009/darpa-challenge-1210.htmhttp://web.mit.edu/press/2009/darpa-challenge-1210.htm


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Ravelryhttp://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry2009: We've got 430,000 registered users, in a month we'll see200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in aday.We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per dayRavelry has been mentioned by Tim Bray as one "of the world's moresuccessful deployments of Ruby and Rails technologies."[5]We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That's registered users only(doesn't include the very few pages that are Google accessible) anddoes not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX.Actual requests that hit Rails per day is 10 million.900 new users sign up per day.The forums are very active with about 50,000 new posts being writteneach day.Some various numbers - 2.3 million knitting/crochet projects, 19million forum posts, 13 million private messages, 8 million photos(the majority are hosted by Flickr).

2011: The site now has 1.4 million registered users, though only about400,000 of those are active every month.
http://https//www.ravelry.com/http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelryhttp://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelryhttp://https//www.ravelry.com/


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.ravelr}t" mv noteeock patterns '" '' people discuss -etonqs eventske l lvsue 's notebook ol>;! lILJru:

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http://www. tbray.orgl ongoing/whe n/200x/2009/09/02/Ravei ryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/07/a_tightknit_community.html

Beyond the "Ravelry is a knit and crochet community", we usually saythat Ravelry is three things:1. An organizational tool for knitters and crocheters. A project album,yarn stash album/inventory, needle inventory - everything aknitter/crocheter might want for personal organization.2. A yarn and pattern database and research tool. Our community-edited yarn and pattern database is something that has neverexisted before. If someone else has used a pattern or yarn, nomatter how obscure, you can probably find information and projectphotos on Ravelry. The personal organizational tool is actuallyentirely public and we were able to create this database byencouraging people who share their projects and information (byusing the organizational tools) to contribute to the yarn and patterndirectory.3. A social site. Forums, groups, friend-related features (like viewing anactivity stream of friend's handspun yarn, projects, etc being added)all give people ways to interact with other knitters and crocheters.4.... there is a also a 4th item, which is "a tool for independentdesigners and yarnies" (we use "yarnies" as a nickname for yarndyers/spinners) From the very beginning, giving small indiedesigners/yarnies a way to show off their work and get the word outhas been a very important part of Ravelry. We feel that we've helpedmany people find an audience and we're proud of that.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/07/a_tightknit_community.htmlhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/07/a_tightknit_community.html


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"The community-edited yarn and pattern database is something that has neverexisted before. If someone else has used a pattern or yarn, no matter howobscure, you can probably find information and project photos on Ravelry. Thepersonal organizational tool is actually entirely public and we were able tocreate this database by encouraging people who share their projects andinformation (by using the organizational tools) to contribute to the yarn andpattern directory."http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/07/a_tightknit_community.htmlRavelry's success is evidence in favor of an argument that you often hear fromFacebook's critics: A single giant social network is no fun. Social sites workbetter when they're smaller and bespoke, created to cater to a specific group.What makes Ravelry work so well is that, in addition to being a place to catchup with friends, it is also a boon to its users' nfavorite hobby-it helps peoplecatalog their yarn, their favorite patterns, and the stuff they've made or plan onmaking. In other words, there is something to do there. And having something todo turns out to make an enormous difference in the way people interact withone another on the Web.

But another reason is the brilliant way Ravelry has struck a compromise betweendisclosure and anonymity. Technically, people on the site are anonymous- ...Because everything you say on the site is associated with your profile, andbecause your profile houses everything you've knitted and want to knit (which,for many people, is more personal than a name and email address), membersfeel they have a strong stake in the site. For that reason, there's a strong
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/07/a_tightknit_communithttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/07/a_tightknit_communit

seeing through social networks [is52026b social computing - week 3]

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