Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
SONIC lab director Noshir Contractor will be giving a keynote address on October 7th titled Using Web Science to Understand and Enable 21st Centuryy Multidimensional Networks at the 3rd International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo’11) in Singapore.
For more details go to http://www.sis.smu.edu.sg/SocInfo2011/index.html
On Friday, October 21, from 2:00-3:00 p.m. University of Oxford Research Fellow, Bernie Hogan will be giving a presentation in Room 1-483 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. This presentation will provide an overview of several studies that explore the phenomena related to how social networks mirror offline networks, albeit not perfectly.
Bernie Hogan is a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. His work focuses on online identity via real names and pseudonyms. He has published methods for analyzing networks and names in City and Communication, Communication & Society, Fields Methods and elsewhere. His tool for downloading Facebook networks (namegenweb) is used worldwide. His 2009 dissertation under Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto won best Dissertation from ICA’s Communivation and Technology Section.
Download the flyer here.
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SONIC lab Director Noshir Contractor will be presenting Friday, September 30th, at the Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN) at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
The title of Contractor’s presentation will is “Using Web Science to Understand and Enable 21st Century Networks”.
For more details on this workshop, go to http://winworkshop.net/index.php.
Two SONIC lab PhD researchers will present at this weekend’s Organizational Communication Mini Conference at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Alina Lungeanu is presenting a paper titled “A network perspective on success in collaboration: Stop citing me for your own good?” exploring patterns of scientific collaboration. Ryan Whalen will present “Government structure as multiplex network: Improving our understanding of inter-organizational relations” in which he explores ways to map and understand government structure.
Paper by danah boyd of Microsoft Research and Kate Crawford of the University of New South Wales, presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s “A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society” on September 21, 2011. Here’s a sample of two of the six provocations:
“The current ecosystem around Big Data creates a new kind of digital divide: the Big Data rich and the Big Data poor.”
“How can students be educated so that they are equally comfortable with algorithms and data analysis as well as with social analysis and theory?”
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.
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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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
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.
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.