Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
SONIC director, Noshir Contractor, was the keynote presenter at VOSS “Toward a Science of Virtual Organizations” invitational workshop. The workshop was hosted by the University of Central Florida and National Science Foundation in Orlando, Florida, May 16-17, 2011.
For more information regarding the workshop please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/ucfdelta/voss2011.
Noshir Contractor was quoted in a recent article published in Bloomberg Businessweek, discussing some of the issues in companies’ internal social networks:
Some sociologists warn that with so many people making gaffes on Twitter and Facebook, companies should prepare for similar behavior on internal social networks. “Because this started out in the social sphere before the corporate sphere, people will bring the same cavalier attitude,” says Noshir Contractor, a professor of behavioral sciences at Northwestern University. “When people locate something in their mind as being informal, they get in trouble.” That could create problems for employees who are too open on services like Yammer and Chatter, a rival product sold by Salesforce.com. “When you’re considered for a promotion … anything you said on Yammer will be used in some cases to determine if you’re qualified,” Contractor says.
The visualization we featured about the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami was featured by a Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman at the MIT Media Lab’s “Sandbox Summit” and subsequently picked up by David Ewalt at Forbes magazine in a blog post “Playing Well With Others“.
Prof. Noshir Contractor presented a talk at the Spatial Simulations for Social Sciences conference, hosted by the Université of Lausanne titled, “Multidimensional and multi-level network theory.”
You can view the entire video here.
Communications of the ACM, May 2011, features an article on the “Web Science meets Network Science” workshop co-hosted by SONIC at Northwestern University. Read the article at http://bit.ly/flfp2C.
SONIC director, Noshir Contractor, and Professor Stanley Wasserman, of Indiana University, present a special panel and discussion of social network analysis and application at University of Missouri.
The discussion centers on collaborative research and its organization, and will be held Wednesday, April 27, 1-3 p.m. in 572 Bond Life Sciences Center, at University of Missouri.
SONIC director Noshir Contractor, SONIC faculty member Paul M. Leonardi, and ANN collaborator, Peter Monge, recently published an article in the International Journal of Communication, “Network Theory | Multidimensional Networks and the Dynamics of Sociomateriality: Bringing Technology Inside the Network.” The full article is available in PDF online at http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1131/550.
SONIC director Noshir Contractor was recently published in the International Journal of Communication, publication entitled, “Prologue to the Special Section: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age.” The prologue was written by University of Southern California professors Manuel Castells and Peter Monge, and SONIC director Noshir Contractor. The PDF of the prologue is available online at: http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1103/554
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!
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.