It's not just WHO you connect to, but the PATTERNS of connections #CCK11

One of my favourite podcasts is CBCs "Spark". In this episode, Nora Young interviews Valdis Kreb from Orgnet.com about "Social Network Analysis". Valdis describes it, "as a way to mathematically look at how we work in large groups to see something that is otherwise invisible."

Networks, information exchange and relationships in organizations.

Valdis Krebs - Social network analysis: 1987-2007

View more presentations from DERIGalway.

Shashi Shekhar and Dev Oliver's recent position paper, "Computational Modeling of Spatio-temporal Social Networks: A Time-Aggregated Graph Approach" addresses the missing data of time and space in analysis.

“However, traditional graph and random graph models are limited in addressing spatio-temporal questions such as change (e.g., how is trust or leadership changing over time? who are the emerging leaders in a group? what are the recurring changes in a group?), trends (e.g., what are the long-term and short-term trends in network size or structure? what are the exceptions to the long-term trend?), duration (e.g., how long is the tenure of a leader in a group? how long does it take to elevate the level of trust such as a relationship changing from visitor to friend?), migration, mobility and travel (e.g., interplay between travel behavior and size/structure of social networks [Tim 06]). This position paper explores time-aggregated graph models to support computational tools to address such questions.” Read the paper [PDF]