Social Network Analysis
We can demonstrate the strategies for maintaining sustainable and vibrant communities, create successful communication campaigns, and show you how the framework of network analysis can be applied in social situations.
We can demonstrate the strategies for maintaining sustainable and vibrant communities, create successful communication campaigns, and show you how the framework of network analysis can be applied in social situations.
re:publica is “Germany’s largest and most prominent conference on the future of our society and all things digital”. This year’s theme is action and will focus on how digital technologies bring people together to affect social and political change.
Alexis Jacomy who made some of the best applications for web graph visualizations (SIGMa and GexfWalker among them) has come up with the new tool Sigma.Js, which is going to be huge and I’ll explain why.
There’s a lot of criticism towards Facebook for not really allowing an easy way to export your personal data. However, netvizz Facebook app by Bernhard Rieder (professor at University of Amsterdam) provides a tool that can do just that and even much more.
In this 1984 documentary about Apple Computers the company’s engineers reveal the secrets behind the company’s success: having a dedicated core of self-managed people who have a common vision and are motivated to change the world.
Polysingularity is a condition where multiple solutions are possible and yet only some are actualized at any moment of time. It’s a study of how affordances (or environmental opportunities) come into contact with the human capacity to believe and make choices. Polysingularity is best described through the framework of networks where the node’s current state and future condition is dynamically determined by its specificity as well as the multiplicities it belongs to.
In this research (supplemented with a concise slide presentation) we are showing how rumours propagate through networks, how to communicate information to a large group of people efficiently, what makes a message viral, and – most importantly – how the framework of network analysis can enhance our understanding of communication in society. This research was presented at betahaus in February 2012.
Venture fiction is a practice of creating enterprises in order to communicate ideas and not the other way round. It uses the framework of network analysis to conceive of itself and its interactions with the real. Each iteration is a shift from one node to another within a dynamic network, which has capabilities to produce both wandering movement and oscillating multidimensional patterns. Each venture is a strange attractor among many and it is the fiction that propels the entrepreneur to travel between them and to create the new ones.
This is a report on the experiment that Nodus Labs conducted on some of the more active Russian protest Facebook groups formed after the rigged Russian election in 2011. We made two network visualizations for three different protest groups over a period of one month in order to observe their dynamics. We found that the most influential members of these groups were not too politically engaged before the elections and were mainly journalists, students, event organizers, and media workers. We also found that the groups formed around ideological causes (such as “Putin must leave”) stagnated in their development in January 2012, while the groups formed around a call for active participatory actions (“Volunteers for the fair elections”) have grown in size and density considerably, building a very well connected and yet open network that was able to bring many new members together around their cause.
The framework of networks can be very useful when thinking about social dynamics. The people are represented as the nodes and their interactions are the connections between them. Using this model we demonstrate how someone can become influential in a social context in just a few not very obvious steps.
Social media marketing is a burgeoning field in Russia at the moment. In order to understand the structure of this community and the most influential people inside we performed a thorough analysis of one of the most popular Russian SMM Facebook groups called “Internet communication”. We used the approaches and methodology presented in our “Information Contagion” paper, some of which are outlined below.
How to know which of your blog followers have the better capacity to spread your information further across your extended network?