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Reading the source code of social ties

Published: 23 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Though online social network research has exploded during the past years, not much thought has been given to the exploration of the nature of social links. Online interactions have been interpreted as indicative of one social process or another (e.g., status exchange or trust), often with little systematic justification regarding the relation between observed data and theoretical concept. Our research aims to breach this gap in computational social science by proposing an unsupervised, parameter-free method to discover, with high accuracy, the fundamental domains of interaction occurring in social networks. By applying this method on two online datasets different by scope and type of interaction (aNobii and Flickr) we observe the spontaneous emergence of three domains of interaction representing the exchange of status, knowledge and social support. By finding significant relations between the domains of interaction and classic social network analysis issues (e.g., tie strength, dyadic interaction over time) we show how the network of interactions induced by the extracted domains can be used as a starting point for more nuanced analysis of online social data that may one day incorporate the normative grammar of social interaction. Our methods finds applications in online social media services ranging from recommendation to visual link summarization.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WebSci '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science
    June 2014
    318 pages
    ISBN:9781450326223
    DOI:10.1145/2615569
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 23 June 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. anobii
    2. computational sociology
    3. domains of interaction
    4. flickr
    5. social exchange

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    WebSci '14: ACM Web Science Conference
    June 23 - 26, 2014
    Indiana, Bloomington, USA

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    WebSci '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 144 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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