LECTURE 12 Case Studies in Information Networks: Part 2

Today’s Plan 1. Club Nexus 2. Related Work 3. Implications for Design 4. Final Papers

Findings… Look Familiar?

Findings Cont’d…  Club Nexus shows evidence of:  Clustering & Cliques  Bridges – ‘weak ties’ ‘Betweenness’  Homophily  Similarity Drops with Network Distance

Uh, What? Figure 4: Average fraction of users with a common trait (year, undergraduate or graduate status, etc.) as a function of the distance from a user having that trait. The plot is truncated at eight hops because less than.03% of the pairs are separated by more than eight hops.

Pros…  Surprise! Online = Offline!  Applied Theory in an Actual Social Network  Rarity  Oft-Cited ……

…and Cons.  Messy, Self-Report Data  Questionable Methods Choices  Personality ‘Stereotypes’?!  Stanford?!

Small World Effect  How do people use information to search in a network? Lada Adamic and Eytan Adar. “How to search a social network”. Social Networks Volume 27, Issue 3, July 2005, Pages

Implications for Design  Some stable patterns of behavior are difficult to change.  What are the sound assumptions about network of a given structure?  Identifying influential users  What information is exposed to the network?  Social network analysis as a tool for users.

Privacy  How do social networks influence privacy, perceptions of privacy? Stutzman, F. (2006, April). An evaluation of identity-sharing behavior in social network communities. Paper presented at the iDMAa and IMS Code Conference, Oxford, Ohio.

Closing in on Paper Topics

Nuts and Bolts  25 – 35 Pages  30% of your grade  Due May 15 th

Picking a Topic  Scope Narrowly!  Places to start:  Pick a topic from class you are interested in  Pick a particular case study of interest  Pick a particular group or community of interest

Research Strategies Getting Started:  Find a paper you love, expand from there.  Find a paper you hate, expand from there.  Find two papers that disagree, explore the issues.  Find a paper you can apply to another domain.

Next Week Diffusion of Innovations or Everything Malcolm Gladwell wanted you to think he figured out on his own.