SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an area of considerable research interest and activity among Internet researchers, sociologists, physicists, and many others. The kinds of topics of interest vary widely, including understanding connections among friends in social networking sites such as Facebook (Hogan, 2010), examining the political affiliations of contributors to political debates (Hindman, 2007), and uncovering networks of plots in English literature (Moretti, 2005, 2011). Tools to do SNA-oriented research are proliferating, including NodeXL11, Voson12, Pajek13, UCINET14, and many others.15 Few, if any, of these tools, however, have been enabled or optimized for use with web archives.
Challenge: First, work with the developers of major SNA tools to enable and optimize them to work with web archive data. Also, develop innovated new methods only possible once the time dimension is added to network data for tracking things like the evolution of social networks over time by archiving not only the state of social networking sites, but when people create links, maintain links, delete links, communicate with one another, join groups, and leave groups and sites. We need to remember that the web is a network of links, and network analysis provides us insight into the nature of that network.
Examples:
Facebook Analytics: many tools are available to analyse interactions between Facebook users, the flow of influence, and the social graph. One example is Facebook Insight16:
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an area of considerable research interest and activity among Internet researchers, sociologists, physicists, and many others. The kinds of topics of interest vary widely, including understanding connections among friends in social networking sites such as Facebook (Hogan, 2010), examining the political affiliations of contributors to political debates (Hindman, 2007), and uncovering networks of plots in English literature (Moretti, 2005, 2011). Tools to do SNA-oriented research are proliferating, including NodeXL11, Voson12, Pajek13, UCINET14, and many others.15 Few, if any, of these tools, however, have been enabled or optimized for use with web archives.
Challenge: First, work with the developers of major SNA tools to enable and optimize them to work with web archive data. Also, develop innovated new methods only possible once the time dimension is added to network data for tracking things like the evolution of social networks over time by archiving not only the state of social networking sites, but when people create links, maintain links, delete links, communicate with one another, join groups, and leave groups and sites. We need to remember that the web is a network of links, and network analysis provides us insight into the nature of that network.
Examples:
Facebook Analytics: many tools are available to analyse interactions between Facebook users, the flow of influence, and the social graph. One example is Facebook Insight16:
Facebook Analytics: many tools are available to analyse interactions between Facebook users, the flow of influence, and the social graph. One example is Facebook Insight16:
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