News – Page 85 – The Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC)

Ackland to lead Hyperlink Network Analysis Workshop

2011-09-23 No Comments

On Friday, October 7th, from 10:00-12:00p.m. Robert Ackland will be leading a workshop on Hyperlink Network Analysis in Frances Searle Room 1-459 on Northwestern University’s Evanston Campus.

If you plan to attend, please email Marilyn Logan: mjlogan@northwestern.edu, by Thursday, September 29.

This presentation will involve a demonstration of hyperlink network analysis using two software packages: the VOSON System (a web-based application for hyperlink
network construction and analysis) and VOSON+NodeXL (a VOSON plugin to the NodeXL Excel 2007/2010 template for social media network analysis). Topics covered
include: creating a hyperlink network (identifying seed URLs, setting the webcrawler parameters); node preparation (methods for filtering and controlling the grouping of web pages); coding of node attributes; basic social network analysis metrics; network visualization; clustering; website content analysis. Participants wanting to use the software are requested to bring their laptops with Mozilla Firefox and VOSON+NodeXL installed, and must have (free) VOSON user account.
See http://voson.anu.edu.au and http://www.uberlink.com for information on the VOSON project and software. See http://nodexl.codeplex.com for information on NodeXL.

Robert Ackland is a Fellow at the Australian National University, where he conducts empirical social science research into online social and organizational networks. He leads the VOSON project http://voson.anu.edu.au, coordinates the ANU’s Master of Social Research programme and teaches on the social science of the Internet and online research methods. Robert has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and the ANU, where he gained his PhD in 2001.

For full details, view the flyer pdf.

News, SONIC Speaker Series

Robert Ackland SONIC Speaker Series

2011-09-22 No Comments

On Friday, October 7, from 2:00-3:00 p.m. Australian National University Fellow, Robert Ackland will be giving a presentation in Room 1-483 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus.
This presentation provides an overview of empirical research into WWW hyperlink networks.

Social scientific research in this area is classified into three broad approaches, where hyperlink networks are studied as citation networks, issue networks and social networks, respectively. The disciplinary foundations, underlying assumptions and examples of research for each approach are discussed. The presentation then turns to available tools for conducting hyperlink network research, focusing on three particular tools that are associated with the above approaches: SocSciBot, Issuecrawler, and the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) which was created by the presenter. The three tools are compared in the context of a particular research exercise: constructing the hyperlink network of environmental activist organizations. This presentation concludes with a brief outline of the VOSON project.

Robert Ackland is a Fellow at the Australian National University, where he conducts empirical social science research into online social and organizational networks. He leads the VOSON project (http://voson.anu.edu.au), coordinates the ANU’s Master of Social Research programme and teaches on the social science of the Internet and online research methods. Robert has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and the ANU, where he gained his PhD in 2001.

Download the flyer here.

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Comparing Webcrawlers for the Social Sciences

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Networks in the News

Networks of Surnames

2011-09-15 No Comments

You can build networks out of even the most everyday objects! Scientists at the University College London and University of Auckland published a study in PLoS ONE using telephone directories and electoral registers in 17 countries to build two-mode networks linking given names to surnames. When these graphs are projected into a one-mode network, they reveal interesting cultural and ethnic community structures about how surnames are linked to each other by common given names. The graph at right, for example, includes distinct clusters of South Asian\Indian, Tongan, Samoan and other Pacific Islander, and Eastern European names in New Zealand. The structure of this network suggests that socio-cultural naming practices reproduce themselves in diasporic communities but globalization is also driving interesting and emergent “mashups”. source: ScienceDaily

Events, News

Yuval Kalish Workshop

2011-09-12 No Comments

Yuval Kalish, an assistant professor in the Department of Management of Tel Aviv University will be leading a workshop on Wednesday, September 14 from 2:00-5:30 pm in Frances Searle, Room 1.459.
This workshop provides a hands-on tutorial on how to fit Exponential Random Graph (ERG) Models for social selection using Pnet.

If you plan on attending, please RSVP to Marilyn Logan by 5pm September 13.

ERG models have been referred to as the most promising technique for the modeling of social networks (Snijders, 2007), and has wide applications in the area of organizational studies and communication studies. Topics include: the logic of ERG models, Parameter selection and estimation, parameter interpretation, Goodness of Fit, and troubleshooting convergence issues.
We will discuss Multivariate ERG models if time permits and there is participant interest. Participants are requested to bring their laptops after they have downloaded pnet from: www.sna.unimelb.edu.au/pnet/pnet.html and made sure that it works on their computer.

Networks in the News, News, SONIC News

Oncofertility Consortium Conference

2011-09-12 No Comments

On Tuesday, September 13, Alina Lungeanu and Curie Chang will be presenting the following video poster at the 2011 Oncofertility Consortium® Conference – “Priorities for Sustainable Oncofertility Research and Patient Care”. The video features Oncofertility Consortium founder Theresa Woodruff, SONIC Lab director Noshir Contractor, and researchers Alina Lungeanu, Curie Chang, and Mengxiao Zhu speaking about how research in the Oncofertility discipline started and how it has evolved over the years.

Events, News, SONIC News, SONIC Speaker Series

Maria Binz-Scharf SONIC Speaker Series

2011-09-09 No Comments

Professor Maria Binz-Scharf will be presenting “Collaborative Production of Scientific Knowledge” on Thursday, September 15, 2011 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Research scientists have become increasingly dependent on collaborations across laboratories and organizations to maintain their productivity. However, growing specialization of individual laboratories works against a current drive towards understanding systems in the sciences. Consequently, there is a tension between the rising importance of collaborative efforts and the practical and structural challenges in establishing and managing such collaborations in the quest to understand our world. Drawing on ethnographic case studies of three academic research labs, we illustrate how scientific knowledge is produced in collaborations that are established and maintained through virtual organizations (VOs). As much as VOs can facilitate scientific work across time and space, they do not eradicate the social aspects (e.g. trust among scientists, institutional limitations, laboratory cultures) to scientific knowledge production.

Maria Binz-Scharf is Associate Professor of Management at the City College of CUNY, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. Her research examines how individuals search for and share knowledge to accomplish work. In particular, she is interested in understanding the role technology plays in processes of knowledge sharing and innovation. With the support of grants from the NSF and NIH, she has studied the knowledge networks of biologists, primary care physicians, and DNA forensic scientists.

Download the flyer here.

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Collaborative Production of Scientific Knowledge

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News, SONIC News

HetRec 2011 paper accepted

2011-09-02 No Comments

SONIC lab collaborator Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and Hugh Devlin, Yun Huang, and Director Noshir Contractor of the SONIC lab, had a paper entitled “Expert Recommendation based on Social Drivers, Social Network Analysis, and Semantic Data Representation” accepted by the 2nd International Workshop on Information Heterogeneity and Fusion in Recommender Systems (HetRec 2011) held as part of the 5^th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2011).

News, SONIC News

Video Lectures of Virtual World Observatory presentations

2011-08-18 No Comments

Brian Keegan presented Virtual World Observatory research at the ACM Web Science and AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) this summer. Video lectures of these presentations and the slide decks are now available:

Web Science: http://videolectures.net/acmwebsci2011_keegan_intersection/

ICWSM: http://videolectures.net/icwsm2011_keegan_clandestine/

Events, SONIC Speaker Series

Yuval Kalish SONIC Speaker Series

2011-08-17 No Comments

Visiting scholar Yuval Kalish will be presenting “Till Stress Do Us Part: Linking Communication networks, Stress and Voluntary Exit in Extreme Contexts” on Monday, August 29, 2011 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Research has linked stress with various withdrawal behaviors, including voluntary exit from groups. research also demonstrated that stress is contagious – it spreads among group members. However, there is no detailed theory or study of the mechanisms by which stress is disseminated by individuals to others in a group. We discuss and empirically test four stress-related processes that explain why some individuals voluntarily leave their group.

Two hundred and seventy-eight individuals (17 groups) in a unique military setting were measured for their communication-network structure and individual stress at three time-points. Using HLM and stochastic actor-oriented models for social networks, we found support for stress-related withdrawal and selection, and for stress-contagion. Managerial implications are discussed.

Yuval Kalish is assistant professor at the Department of Management, Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on the relationship between individual attributes, networks structures and outcomes within and between organizations. He focuses on the modeling of social networks using Exponential Random Graph models (for which he jointly received the most cited paper award in Social Networks) and other analytic techniques. He teaches courses on leadership, conflict management, statistics and network analysis.

Download the flyer here.

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Till Stress Do Us Part

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Events, News, SONIC News

MTS studies featured on Army Research Lab Blog

2011-08-11 No Comments

The work of several SONIC researchers including Brooke Foucault Welles, and Tony Vashevko has been featured in the Army Research Lab’s Network Science-Collaborative Technology Alliance Blog. The information can be found after the jump, halfway down the blog under “Multi-Team Systems Simulation”.
Whether it’s emergency relief due to natural disasters or humanitarian aid in war torn regions, there are situations where international organizations, first responders, and military personnel need to collaborate effectively on teams in stressful situations. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will use the Multi-team System Simulation – or MTS Platform – to gain insight on how network parameters can be configured to better allow small teams to coordinate in such emergency situations.