Social network analysis (SNA) & applications

Social media tools such as email, discussion forums, blogs, micro-blogs, and wikis are used by billions of people worldwide. As they communicate through these media via desktop and web-based applications on fixed and mobile devices the result is the creation of multiple complex social network structures. The lively interaction and networks of relationships created through these technologies is of growing importance to individuals, organizations, and communities. Understanding how these social media networks grow, change, fail, or succeed is a growing concern to researchers and professionals. The field of social network analysis provides a set of concepts and metrics to systematically study these dynamic processes. The methods of information visualization have also become valuable in helping users to discover patterns, trends, clusters, and outliers, even in complex social networks.

These days, in our class, we learned social network analysis (SNA), the useful network analyzing method. It is the study of the pattern of interaction between actors. In SNA, every activator is present as a node (vertex) and the action between each other is shown by lines (edges) connected to nodes. With these vertices and edges, we can generate some social graph from which we can clearly find the relationship of everyone there.

To analyze a network, several software could be applied, such as UCINET, Pajek, NetMiner, Multinet, Stocnet, Strucuture, NodeXL, ect.

This is one of social grams I made using software NodeXL. The data is collected by Oct 29, and it just shows people in our class.

Social graph can be classified to undirected graph and directed graph. Undirected graph just displays the connecting condition and directed graph can show the direction of each information flow.

Some important indexes could be obtained from SNA.

Degree( degree centrality)-----analyzing in undirected graph. It’s a count of the number of edges that are connected to it. If the edges represented strong friendship ties of individuals in a class, we might say that XX is the most popular person. In directed graph, we analyze in-degree and out-degree, which respectively show the number of edges that point toward the vertex of interest or the vertex of interest points towards.

The following graph is a sub graph of Su Jing, who is the one with the biggest degree(the most popular one) by Oct 29. Generating subgragh image is a useful way to understand complex networks is to view individual sections of the larger graph. It represents the information exchanging condition on a certain individual in the organization.

If we say degree is about popularity, then betweenness centrality is about if the vertex is important in connecting the whole system. Vertices that are included in many of the shortest path between other vertices have a higher Betweenness Centrality than those that are not included.

Closeness centrality presents how close each person is to others in the network. It’s a measure of the average shortest distance from each vertex to each other. A lower closeness centrality score indicates a more central position in the network.

The parameters above are all important when dealing with individuals in the network. If we put the focus on the whole system, we should discuss the density and clustering coefficient…

Nowadays, SNA is widely used in fields such as business link, emergency service, academic collaboration, ect. The methods of information visualization have also become valuable in helping users to discover patterns, trends, clusters, and outliers, even in complex social networks.

Group & individual epistemic cognition

In this blog, I would answer questions left in the last lecture.

1.     Re-answer questions in Class Activity One and Two.

Questions: a) What’s the definition of Social Cloud?  b) what are the possible applications of a Social Cloud ?

l  Activity One

a)     A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network.

b)    A Social Computation Cloud; A Social Storage Cloud; A Social Collaborative Cloud; A Social Cloud for Public Science; An Enterprise Social Cloud.

l  Activity Two

a)     A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. A Social Cloud leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users to enable mutually beneficial sharing within the context of a social network.

b)    A Social Computation Cloud: It is widely recognized that extensive computing power remains untapped through personal computers; A Social Storage Cloud: Storage is perhaps the simplest and most standardized resource for everyday users to share and utilize in a Social Cloud; A Social Collaborative Cloud: increasingly collaborations are turning to social networking concepts to share information and resources within diverse user communities, for example MyExperiment.org and nanoHub; A Social Cloud for Public Science: The Social Cloud is an ideal basis on which to create the next iteration of volunteer computing – primarily for solving scientific problems of community interest; An Enterprise Social Cloud: a Social Cloud may be configured differently, depending on the community it serves.

2.     What was the epistemic aim in these 2 activities? Is there any change in epistemic aim? If so, why did you change your mind?

As we can see, the answer in Activity One(individual work) is briefer, and it composed of some short sentence or key words. However, the answer in Activity Two( group work) is more completed and includes more information. In term of epistemic aim, in fact, I just pursue a satisfied answer ‘for the teacher’, cause the time is limited and I’m not interested enough about that article. But in Activity Two, the epistemic aim really changes, we feel free when giving answers, and we pursue more knowledge from group discussion.

3.     Is there any difference in terms of individual and group epistemic cognition, how?

I believe there must be some difference between individual and group epistemic cognition. When people learn things by themselves, if they are not positive learners, or we just say, they are not eager for what they are learning, they may just memorize information as completing a task. It’s inefficient. Opposed to individual learning, group learning can obtain better effect. In a group, we can get information from various aspects, people share their own knowledge and feelings. In a word, I hold the idea that individual learning is static, and group learning is dynamic.

4.     How did you approach to the problem individually and in group, respectively? Is there any difference in the processes involved?

When solving a problem individually, I would get help from related books or the Internet. It’s dull and waste more time as you may totally misunderstand the problem. However, when I am in a group, I would firstly handle the problem by myself, if there’s anything confusing me, I would inquire to other group members. Though this way, I always feel supportive and informed.

In my opinion, the attitude towards individual & group epistemic cognition varies from people to people. Additionally, male and female behave different in these 2 conditions. Generally, females are more likely to work in a group cause they may have a better communicating ability and more sensitive, while males tend to enjoy work alone. In fact, many factors can affect humans’ view on group & individual epistemic cognition. Further work can be done on these fields.

online behavior and psychology

online behavior and psychology

This is my second post, and I’d like to discuss people’s online behaviors with you guys.

We have already known that this course is not only on social web but also on the relationship between people’s online behaviors and psychology from the beginning. After this class, I got a deeper understanding.

Dr. Rosanna mentioned that social psychologists identified the following 5 strategic motives in the way we attempt to present ourselves. Out of curiosity, I was eager to know whether individuals’ online behaviors are all related to these 5 motives. I checked social web like Renren, Weibo, Twitter, BBS and hunted for examples to try confirming this theory.

1.     Self-promotion: trying to persuade others that you are competent.

In order to show his close relationship with citizens and achieve a good effect of propaganda, the U.S. president Obama registers a Twitter account and communicates with Twitter users.

2.  Ingratiation: trying to get others like you.

Stars would do this to show his care, and of course the implicit purpose is to get his friends or fans like him. Similarly, we normal people would behave in this way.

3.    Intimidation: trying to get others to think you are dangerous.

This always occurred in the election process. My dear friends, could you help me find an example to support this motive?

4.    Exemplification: trying to get others to regard you as a morally respectable individual.

5.    Supplication: trying to get others to take pity on you as helpless and needy.

I can see the most cases people present themselves with this motive. Just as Dr. Rosanna exampled us that the high school girl posted the picture of her drops of tear to gain comfort from her friends. I realize about 40 percent of new posts describing their condition on Renren are ‘complaints’ or something embarrassing happened to them.

With the increasing popularity of all sorts of social media, people, especially young people, are more willing to chat and recognize the whole world online rather than go outside and feel the real world. Just because it’s more convenient and perhaps they think it stands for fashion. But I am wondering if the ‘person’ presents on the Internet is real. Is there any discrepancy between the online you and the offline you?

 

The picture was found in a book called ‘Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web’, which shows the comparison between self-presentation offline and online on social networking sites under consideration of the dimension ‘impression construction’.

From my point of view, the online behaviors cannot totally stand for a person’s characteristics and the difference-degree distinguishes from person to person. For instance, I have a friend who has several Weibo accounts, as she has different social communities, colleges, closest friends and fans group. As a result, the girl performs distinct behaves in each online social hub and feels different sense of consonance.

All in all, as separate elements in the huge social network, we are crowded by tons of information. We’d better learn to analysis the psychology basis of online behaviors, and then we can know what to achieve and what to abandon. Let the online resources help you grow rather than be blindly influenced by them.

 

 

Some opinions about online social networking: some opinions about social networking

Some opinions about online social networking: some opinions about social networking: Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! This is the first post about our course, social networking, and I’d like to show some of   my ow...

some opinions about social networking

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog!

This is the first post about our course, social networking, and I’d like to show some of  my own opinions about social web .

Many years ago, people communicated only by face-to-face talking. They got information and learned things from people around them. Individuals in one area were separated to those living in others areas by factors on region and technology. As a result, their knowledge is limited. But humans are innate social creatures. If we weren’t social from the day we are born, then social software would be incongruous: it just wouldn’t make sense. With humans’ strong desire to gain knowledge or to share mood with others, things changed, which telephone , email, BBS, social web kinds of social networking related devices or methods appeared one after another.

Nowadays, social software is accelerating. Social webs such as Amazon, Ebay, MySpace, Facebook are widely used by people around the world. From this point, I was wondering how to make sure a social web being popular?

Maybe the following aspects are in need.

1.     Effective interface

The challenge of social web is to design interface that support the current and desired social behavior of the people who use them. If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it and if the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it.

2.      Build a unique core feature set

People like things have unique characteristics. So if a social web is totally similar with the other one, there would be no market to promote.

3.     Mind The Usage Lifecycle

Someone has already put forward the definition of The Usage Lifecycle.

The picture shows a set of stages people go through when using software and there are different hurdles between each two stages. To overcome these hurdles we need to design sign-up area, sharing area and ect. carefully.

So. That’s all.

I would appreciate it if your make a comment or give me some suggestions. Thank you.