At the beginning of last month, SONIC helped host the Third International Workshop on Network Theory: Web Science Meets Network Science. The photos have been posted on the event page: you can view them here. Thanks again to everyone who made the workshop such a success!
Gold farming team wins best paper
The VWO Gold Farming team won the award for Best Paper at the Game Behind the Game conference hosted by Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. Our paper was titled “Mapping Gold Farming Back to Offline Clandestine Organizations: Methodological, Theoretical, and Ethical Challenges.” The abstract is below:
“Clandestine”, “covert”, “dark” and “illicit” organizations are primarily characterized by the need to engage in coordination and collective action while also emphasizing secrecy and security (Ayling, 2009). However, empirical analyses of offline clandestine organizations’ structures have received scant attention because traditional data collection is difficult by design. Studies of clandestine organizations employ methods which censor their embeddedness within particular historical contexts and larger licit spheres of peripheral and legitimate actors. These studies rely on descriptive, single level methods. However, the explosion of behavioral data available in online databases has opened up new avenues of social research. To the extent that individuals in online worlds operate under similar social and psychological motivations and constraints as the offline world, it is possible to use generative models of clandestine networks from online virtual worlds to test and inform theories of clandestine networks in offline contexts (Williams, 2010). We use gold farmers in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) as a case to examine how clandestine organizations assemble and maintain their operations in the face of pressure to remain competitive and secret. We review our recent research findings employing methods in network analysis and machine learning to detect and identify gold farmers in a popular MMOG based on distinct structural motifs in trade exchanges, patterns of behavioral similarity, and appropriation of in-game affordances. Although these findings on virtual clandestine organizations comport with many existing theoretical predictions as well as observations from offline criminal behavior, we discuss how they fail to map from online to offline in other contexts. Finally, we discuss the ethical implications of attempting to develop abstract heuristics for identifying clandestine behavior in data rich contexts and conclude by identifying future directions for analytic and theoretical research.
CCAP data collection begins in South Chicago
SONIC’s Chicago Climate Action Plan (CCAP) research team has launched its second full-scale network survey study in the South Chicago community. The objective of the study is to map the information and communication networks of residents, especially as they relate to community/household and climate change related issues. Information about these networks will be leveraged to inform and guide the city-wide CCAP Initiative. Data collection in South Chicago is scheduled to take place through the end of May.
CaringTV: A support network based on e-services
The CaringTV interface during a program broadcast from their studio in Laurea University, Helsinki.
Aino lives alone in a small town in Finland.
She is 72 years old. The nearest doctor is more than five miles away and she doesn’t have a car.
Even though she doesn’t have a computer or use email, Aino does have a touchscreen (equipped with a video camera) that connects her to the world.
It’s something called CaringTV.
“It’s a lifeline for every day,” says Aino, who only speaks Finnish. “If they remove the device, I would feel like something was missing.”
CaringTV is a technological platform for the elderly, developed by Laurea University of Applied Sciences, TDC Song, Videra Oy and Espoo City. Its goal? To deliver welfare services to Finland’s growing elderly population through an ordinary TV set — a device used commonly by seniors.
Every day at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., Aino sits in front of a touchscreen and video camera to tune into CaringTV’s interactive programs. These programs range from physical exercises to singing, from spiritual discussions to trivia games.
The above set-up is provided to every CaringTV client — they can tune into programs or call friends using their individual touchscreens at home.
The CaringTV interface also offers “point-to-point” video calling for clients. To access her friend list, all Aino has to do is tap “Puhelinluettelo” on her screen and she can connect to anyone immediately.
Although CaringTV’s main purpose is focused on improving the quality of life for Finland’s elderly population, the social aspect is by no means a secondary goal.
“The social contact is important, almost the main point in CaringTV,” says researcher Katja Tikkanen.
According to Tikkanen, many of the CaringTV clients (previously strangers) have transitioned from virtual friendships to friendships in the real world. The interface serves as a means of support and connection for Aino, who doesn’t have to live totally alone anymore.
“After watching the programs, we will usually stay on the channel to chat with each other,” she says.
Katie Zhu (SONIC) received a grant from the Medill School of Journalism to travel to Helsinki and investigate living labs and their societal implications. She plans to research the CaringTV network further in her work at SONIC and investigate the questions of how support is provided and how friendships are developed among clients.
WebScience Paper Accept
The Virtual World Observatory‘s gold farming team has had their paper “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi Virtuali? Promise and Peril at the Intersection of Computational Social Science and Online Clandestine Organizations” accepted for full paper presentation at WebSci 2011 in Koblenz, Germany in June.
WINNERS IN THE DATA PRE-PROCESSING CHALLENGE (France, Complex Systems Institute of Paris Ile-de-France)
Yun Huang, Alina Lungeanu, Chuang Zhang (SONIC lab) together with their collaborators from NICO (Mike Stringer, Jonathan Haynes), and AMARAL Lab (Dan McClary, Xiaohan Zeng) are the winners for the data pre-processing challenge at Mining the Digital Traces of Science (MDTS11) International Workshop with their submission “Structured and Relational Information Extraction”.
Based on a dataset provided by Thomson ISI Web of Science, with a focus on embryology and embryonic science from 1956 to 2010, the team developed AWK and Python scripts to extract more than 30 attributes related to articles, issues, and authors and construct 16 relational tables in MySQL.
Using SQL stored procedures, users can easily extract author-publication, author-citation, co-authorship, and citation similarity relations as well as related author keywords, keyword plus, addresses, publication years, and subject categories for a subset or all authors.
The data pre-processing scripts facilitate the collaboration on designing and developing innovative tools to access scientific publication databases (such as ISI Web of Science), in order to empower users with new methods of navigation, interaction, and data visualization for this kind of databases.
MDTS11 Collaborative Challenge Winners page: http://www.iscpif.fr/tiki-index.php?page=mdtschallengewinners
AAP Updates Guidelines on Kids and Social Media
When you tell parents that you study kids and social media, they invariably complain about Facebook (or it’s pre-teen brethren, Club Penguin and Togetherville), and ask if all this social networking is good or bad for kids. As with many social science questions, the answer, of course, is “it depends.”
A new report in the April issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, weighs in on the issue and encourages pediatricians to talk about social media and online social networking with parents. Although the report doesn’t get deep into network science, it does allude to some of the common findings from our field. For instance, the authors cite studies suggesting that kids can benefit by expanding their networks online to include contacts that are more numerous and diverse than they may otherwise encounter in their offline networks, affording them access to information and resources they might not otherwise have. Likewise, kids may be able to find communities of practice online where they can build social skills and participate in collective action around a cause that matters to them.
The authors also warn of the potential downsides of online networks, including increased risk of cyberbullying, sexting, and something they call “Facebook depression,” which they imply (without the benefit of many peer-reviewed references) can arise when there is a mismatch between the perception of social support and acceptance from online networks, and the actual support and acceptance received from those networks.
The report concludes with a series of generalized warnings about online privacy, and recommends that pediatricians discuss online social networking with the parents of their patients, in light of the, “challenging social and health issues that online youth experience.”
Personally, I was happy to see that the AAP is talking about social media, even if the report was a bit alarmist for my tastes. I think the privacy risks were somewhat overstated, and I would have liked to see more emphasis on placed on the role that online media play in strengthening existing social ties, an important benefit of social media that was not noted in the report.
What do you think? Does the report do a good job informing parents and doctors about the benefits and risks of social networking? Has your pediatrician discussed social networking sites with you or your children?
Read the full report, here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/peds.2011-0054v1
Or the press release from the AAP, here: http://aap.org/advocacy/releases/socialmedia2011.htm
ICA Doctoral Consortium Acceptance
Brooke Foucault Welles has been invited to participate in the Doctoral Consortium of the Communication and Technology (CAT) at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Boston, MA on May 26, 2011. Brooke will be presenting her dissertation research on friendship networks in Second Life for feedback from a panel of esteemed faculty from across the field of communication (including SONIC’s own Noshir Contractor).
Dissertation Project Overview:
Friendships are among the most important relationships in an individual’s life. Throughout adolescence and into adulthood, friends take on ever-increasing importance, becoming the locus of significant social, emotional, and functional support. As online social media grow in popularity, the Internet is becoming increasingly involved in the formation and maintenance of friendships. Although research shows that individuals more frequently use the Internet to communicate with friends that they first met in the offline world, making new friends online is not uncommon. In a recent survey of adult Internet users in the US, 16% of respondents reported having made at least one friend online, amounting to approximately 25 million new Internet-based friendships in the US alone (Katz & Rice, 2009). Adolescents report having online friendships at similar rates, with approximately 14% of teens reporting having close friends that they know exclusively through online interactions (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2003).
Despite a considerable amount of attention paid to online friendship in the Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) literature, prior studies have largely focused on friendship at the individual or dyad level, using surveys or in-depth interviews to discover how individual dispositions or preferences lead to the emergence of friendships online (i.e. Livingstone & Bober, 2004; Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2002 ; Wolak, et al., 2003). While such studies provide important foundational insight into the nature of online relationships, they only tell part of the story. Based on research conducted in the offline world, we know that friendship selection is not driven exclusively by individual preferences. Instead, individual preferences, dyadic pressures, and structural forces all work concurrently to shape and constrain how friendships emerge and develop over time (Cairns & Cairns, 1994).
The purpose of my dissertation research is to extend the existing body of literature by taking network analytic approach to understanding online friendship. I will apply Monge and Contractor’s (2003) multi-theoretical multilevel modeling approach to study the emergence of friendship ties between previously unacquainted users of the virtual world Second Life. In doing so, I will be able to compare the relative effects of individual, dyadic and structural-level forces on the processes of friendship selection online. Further, recognizing recent discussions about the inconsistencies between the way individuals understand online and offline friendship (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), and because the limitations of quantitative network analysis do not allow for a deep understanding of why certain structural patterns emerge, I will supplement my quantitative studies with qualitative research conducted within Second Life with users of that virtual world. Together, these two approaches will offer a more complete picture of how and why online friendships form, and will lay the foundation for future discussions of the utility, stability and quality of these relationships.
ICWSM Paper Acceptance
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Brian Keegan, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava, and Noshir Contractor had their paper “Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs” accepted to the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Notably, it is the authors’ first attempt and acceptance for a paper invoking a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I: “A plague upon’t when thieves cannot be true one to another!” – Falstaff, II.ii
Abstract:
Gold farming and real money trade refer to a set of illicit practices in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) whereby players accumulate virtual resources to sell for ―real world money. Prior work has examined trade relationships formed by gold farmers but not the trust relationships which exist between members of these organizations. We adopt a hypergraph approach to model the multi-modal relationships of gold farmers granting other players permission to use and modify objects they own. We argue these permissions reflect underlying trust relationships which can be analyzed using network analysis methods. We compare farmers’ trust networks to the trust networks of both unidentified farmers and typical players. Our results demonstrate that gold farmers’ networks are different from trust networks of normal players whereby farmers trust highly-central non-farmer players but not each other. These findings have implications for augmenting detection methods and re-evaluating theories of clandestine behavior.
Wikipedia articles affected by Tohoku earthquake
Brian Keegan’s dissertation will use Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news articles to examine the high-tempo and high-reliability coordination practices of emergent, self-assembling teams. Wikipedia’s response to and coverage of the tragic events over the past week in Japan continues to provide a fascinating corpus for analysis. Some factoids:
- The English article about the earthquake with links to the relevant sites for the US Geological Survey and Integrated Tsunami Watch Service was started at 6:18 GMT, just over 32 minutes after the earthquake began. The bureaucratic editorial process of nominating it to appear on the front page of Wikipedia was begun at 6:29. The article appeared on the front page by 7:58 after being vetted by 12 editors and at least one administrator. As a point of comparison, The New York Times (the first to report according to Memeorandum) did not file a story until 7:35.
- Between the start of the article and noon CDT on March 15 (~100 hours after the earthquake), 761 editors made 2,901 contributions. The average time between edits over this entire window was 2 minutes, 4 seconds. The median was 1:08.
- At the time, 49 other articles had been categorized by Wikipedians as being affected by or related to the earthquake and tsunami. 1683 unique editors made 6,931 contributions to these articles, including the one above. In that 100 hour time window, the average interval between edits made to articles in this category was 56 seconds. The median was 37 seconds.
A (very crude) temporal visualization of how the activity among editors to these articles can be seen in the video below. The text is admittedly hard to read, try full-screening the video. The red nodes are the articles, the blue nodes are editors, and the links indicate which editors edited which articles. The “halos” of small blue nodes around the articles are the editors who contributed only to that article and none of the other articles. The clump of larger blue nodes in the center are editors who contributed to many of the other articles. Be sure to pay attention to when they make the switch to only editing one article to editing others. Note the switch in “attention” from the article about the earthquake & tsunami to the nuclear reactor as well as the lag before the articles about the affected communities (located at approximately 1 o’clock) are updated. The article at approximately 3 o’clock is the “Fukushima I nuclear accidents” article which is created more than 48 hours after the earthquake itself.
100 Hours of Wikipedia activity for Sendai earthquake from Brian Keegan on Vimeo.