Vorlesung 11: Platforms for Social Network Flashcards
Social media platforms
▪ Called social media (platforms), social networking (sites/ platforms), social networks
▪ Transaction or hybrid platforms
▪ Typically multi-sided platforms (users, developers, advertisers,…)
▪ Content is exchanged
▪ Core features of social media platforms (Kane et al., 2014):
▪ Digital profile
▪ Search and privacy
▪ Relational ties
▪ Network transparency
Background: Network Analysis (NA)
▪ SNA has its origins in both social science and in the broader fields of network analysis (NA) and graph theory:
▪ NA concerns itself with the formulation and solution of problems that have a network structure; such structure is usually captured in a graph.
▪ Graph theory provides a set of abstract concepts and methods for the analysis of graphs.
▪ These, in combination with other analytical tools and with methods developed specifically for the visualization and analysis of social (and other) networks, form the basis of what we call SNA methods.
▪ But SNA is not just a methodology; it is a unique perspective on how society functions. Instead of focusing on individuals and their attributes (or on macroscopic social structures) it focuses on relations between individuals, groups, or social institutions.
Newman et al, 2006
Newman et al, 2006
A very early example of NA comes from the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). Famous mathematician Leonard Euler used a graph to prove that there is no path that crosses each of the city’s bridges
Practical applications
▪ Businesses use SNA to analyze and improve the communication flow within their organization or with their networks of partners and customers
▪ Law enforcement agencies and the army use SNA to identify criminal and terrorist networks from traces of communication that they collect and then identify key players in these networks
▪ Social Network Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, XING, etc. use basic elements of SNA to identify and recommend potential friends based on friends-of- friends
▪ Civil society organizations use SNA to uncover conflicts of interest in hidden connections between government bodies, lobbies, and businesses
▪ Network operators (telephony, cable, mobile) use SNA-like methods to optimize the structure and capacity of their networks
▪ Marketing/ Targeting: find key influencers
▪ Mobility Networks: find hubs/ important relations
▪ Page Rank: find important web sites ▪…
Why and when to use SNA
▪ Whenever you are studying a social network, either offline or online, or when you wish to understand how to improve the effectiveness of the network
▪ When you want to visualize your data so as to uncover patterns in relationships or interactions
▪ When you want to follow the paths that information (or basically anything) follows in social networks
▪ When you do quantitative research, although for qualitative research a network perspective is also valuable
▪ The range of actions and opportunities afforded to individuals are often a function of their positions in social networks; uncovering these positions (instead of relying on common assumptions based on their roles and functions, say as fathers, mothers, teachers, workers) can yield more interesting and sometimes surprising results
▪ A quantitative analysis of a social network can help you identify different types of actors in the network or key players, whom you can focus on for your qualitative research
Problem of Degree centrality
Interpretation of measures
Cohesion
Measures of overall network structure
Density (or connectedness)
Cohesion
Measures of overall network structure
Degree of reciprocity
ocial networks
Common properties of social networks
