Social Network Analysis
The tendency of humans to connect with one another is a deep-rooted social need that precedes the advent of the Web and Internet technologies. In the past, social interactions were achieved through face-to-face contact, postal mail, and telecommunication
- PDF / 1,740,042 Bytes
- 43 Pages / 504.567 x 720 pts Page_size
- 104 Downloads / 208 Views
Social Network Analysis
“I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.”—Tim Berners-Lee
19.1
Introduction
The tendency of humans to connect with one another is a deep-rooted social need that precedes the advent of the Web and Internet technologies. In the past, social interactions were achieved through face-to-face contact, postal mail, and telecommunication technologies. The last of these is also relatively recent when compared with the history of mankind. However, the popularization of the Web and Internet technologies has opened up entirely new avenues for enabling the seamless interaction of geographically distributed participants. This extraordinary potential of the Web was observed during its infancy by its visionary founders. However, it required a decade before the true social potential of the Web could be realized. Even today, Web-based social applications continue to evolve and create an ever-increasing amount of data. This data is a treasure trove of information about user preferences, their connections, and their influences on others. Therefore, it is natural to leverage this data for analytical insights. Although social networks are popularly understood in the context of large online networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, such networks represent only a small minority of the interaction mechanisms enabled by the Web. In fact, the traditional study of social network analysis in the field of sociology precedes the popularization of technologically enabled mechanisms. Much of the discussion in this chapter applies to social networks that extend beyond the popular notions of online social networks. Some examples are as follows: • Social networks have been studied extensively in the field of sociology for more than a century but not from an online perspective. Data collection was rather difficult in these scenarios because of the lack of adequate technological mechanisms. Therefore, these studies were often conducted with painstaking and laborious methods for manual data collection. An example of such an effort is Stanley Milgram’s famous six degrees of separation experiment in the sixties, which used postal mail between participants C. C. Aggarwal, Data Mining: The Textbook, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-14142-8 19 c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
619
620
CHAPTER 19. SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS to test whether two arbitrary humans on the planet could be connected by a chain of six relationships. Because of the difficulty in verifying local forwards of mail, such experiments were often hard to conduct in a trustworthy way. Nevertheless, in spite of the obvious flaws in the experimental setting, these results have recently been shown to be applicable to online social networks, where the relationships between individuals are more easily quantifiable. • A number of technological enablers, such as telecommunications, email, and electronic chat messengers, can be considered indirect forms of social networks. Such enablers result in communications between different individual
Data Loading...
