Computational Social Networks


Book Description

This book is the first of three volumes that illustrate the concept of social networks from a computational point of view. The book contains contributions from a international selection of world-class experts, with a specific focus on practical tools, applications, and open avenues for further research (the other two volumes review issues of Security and Privacy, and Mining and Visualization in CSNs). Topics and features: presents the latest advances in CSNs, and illustrates how organizations can gain a competitive advantage by applying these ideas in real-world scenarios; discusses the design and use of a wide range of computational tools and software for social network analysis; describes simulations of social networks, the representation and analysis of social networks, and the use of semantic networks in knowledge discovery and visualization; provides experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories relating to specific problems in network technology.




Computational Social Network Analysis


Book Description

Social networks provide a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of people or people-to-technology interaction. Web 2.0 has enabled a new generation of web-based communities, social networks, and folksonomies to facilitate collaboration among different communities. This unique text/reference compares and contrasts the ethological approach to social behavior in animals with web-based evidence of social interaction, perceptual learning, information granulation, the behavior of humans and affinities between web-based social networks. An international team of leading experts present the latest advances of various topics in intelligent-social-networks and illustrates how organizations can gain competitive advantages by applying the different emergent techniques in real-world scenarios. The work incorporates experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories with specific network technology problems. Topics and Features: Provides an overview social network tools, and explores methods for discovering key players in social networks, designing self-organizing search systems, and clustering blog sites, surveys techniques for exploratory analysis and text mining of social networks, approaches to tracking online community interaction, and examines how the topological features of a system affects the flow of information, reviews the models of network evolution, covering scientific co-citation networks, nature-inspired frameworks, latent social networks in e-Learning systems, and compound communities, examines the relationship between the intent of web pages, their architecture and the communities who take part in their usage and creation, discusses team selection based on members’ social context, presents social network applications, including music recommendation and face recognition in photographs, explores the use of social networks in web services that focus on the discovery stage in the life cycle of these web services. This useful and comprehensive volume will be indispensible to senior undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in Social Intelligence, as well as to researchers, developers, and postgraduates interested in intelligent-social-networks research and related areas.




Social Network Analytics


Book Description

Social Network Analytics: Computational Research Methods and Techniques focuses on various technical concepts and aspects of social network analysis. The book features the latest developments and findings in this emerging area of research. In addition, it includes a variety of applications from several domains, such as scientific research, and the business and industrial sectors. The technical aspects of analysis are covered in detail, including visualizing and modeling, network theory, mathematical models, the big data analytics of social networks, multidimensional scaling, and more. As analyzing social network data is rapidly gaining interest in the scientific research community because of the importance of the information and insights that can be culled from the wealth of data inherent in the various aspects of the network, this book provides insights on measuring the relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and more. Examines a variety of data analytic techniques that can be applied to social networks Discusses various methods of visualizing, modeling and tracking network patterns, organization, growth and change Covers the most recent research on social network analysis and includes applications to a number of domains




Introduction to Computational Social Science


Book Description

This textbook provides a comprehensive and reader-friendly introduction to the field of computational social science (CSS). Presenting a unified treatment, the text examines in detail the four key methodological approaches of automated social information extraction, social network analysis, social complexity theory, and social simulation modeling. This updated new edition has been enhanced with numerous review questions and exercises to test what has been learned, deepen understanding through problem-solving, and to practice writing code to implement ideas. Topics and features: contains more than a thousand questions and exercises, together with a list of acronyms and a glossary; examines the similarities and differences between computers and social systems; presents a focus on automated information extraction; discusses the measurement, scientific laws, and generative theories of social complexity in CSS; reviews the methodology of social simulations, covering both variable- and object-oriented models.




Computational Data and Social Networks


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Data and Social Networks, CSoNet 2020, held in Dallas, TX, USA, in December 2020. The 20 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. Additionally the book includes 22 special track papers and 3 extended abstracts. The selected papers are devoted to topics such as Combinatorial Optimization and Learning; Computational Methods for Social Good Applications; NLP and Affective Computing; Privacy and Security; Blockchain; Fact-Checking, Fake News and Malware Detection in Online Social Networks; and Information Spread in Social and Data Networks.




The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks


Book Description

While some social scientists may argue that we have always been networked, the increased visibility of networks today across economic, political, and social domains can hardly be disputed. Social networks fundamentally shape our lives and social network analysis has become a vibrant, interdisciplinary field of research. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks, Ryan Light and James Moody have gathered forty leading scholars in sociology, archaeology, economics, statistics, and information science, among others, to provide an overview of the theory, methods, and contributions in the field of social networks. Each of the thirty-three chapters in this Handbook moves through the basics of social network analysis aimed at those seeking an introduction to advanced and novel approaches to modeling social networks statistically. They cover both a succinct background to, and future directions for, distinctive approaches to analyzing social networks. The first section of the volume consists of theoretical and methodological approaches to social networks, such as visualization and network analysis, statistical approaches to networks, and network dynamics. Chapters in the second section outline how network perspectives have contributed substantively across numerous fields, including public health, political analysis, and organizational studies. Despite the rapid spread of interest in social network analysis, few volumes capture the state-of-the-art theory, methods, and substantive contributions featured in this volume. This Handbook therefore offers a valuable resource for graduate students and faculty new to networks looking to learn new approaches, scholars interested in an overview of the field, and network analysts looking to expand their skills or substantive areas of research.




Doing Computational Social Science


Book Description

Computational approaches offer exciting opportunities for us to do social science differently. This beginner’s guide discusses a range of computational methods and how to use them to study the problems and questions you want to research. It assumes no knowledge of programming, offering step-by-step guidance for coding in Python and drawing on examples of real data analysis to demonstrate how you can apply each approach in any discipline. The book also: Considers important principles of social scientific computing, including transparency, accountability and reproducibility. Understands the realities of completing research projects and offers advice for dealing with issues such as messy or incomplete data and systematic biases. Empowers you to learn at your own pace, with online resources including screencast tutorials and datasets that enable you to practice your skills and get up to speed. For anyone who wants to use computational methods to conduct a social science research project, this book equips you with the skills, good habits and best working practices to do rigorous, high quality work.




Pathways Between Social Science and Computational Social Science


Book Description

This volume shows that the emergence of computational social science (CSS) is an endogenous response to problems from within the social sciences and not exogeneous. The three parts of the volume address various pathways along which CSS has been developing from and interacting with existing research frameworks. The first part exemplifies how new theoretical models and approaches on which CSS research is based arise from theories of social science. The second part is about methodological advances facilitated by CSS-related techniques. The third part illustrates the contribution of CSS to traditional social science topics, further attesting to the embedded nature of CSS. The expected readership of the volume includes researchers with a traditional social science background who wish to approach CSS, experts in CSS looking for substantive links to more traditional social science theories, methods and topics, and finally, students working in both fields.




Practical Social Network Analysis with Python


Book Description

This book focuses on social network analysis from a computational perspective, introducing readers to the fundamental aspects of network theory by discussing the various metrics used to measure the social network. It covers different forms of graphs and their analysis using techniques like filtering, clustering and rule mining, as well as important theories like small world phenomenon. It also presents methods for identifying influential nodes in the network and information dissemination models. Further, it uses examples to explain the tools for visualising large-scale networks, and explores emerging topics like big data and deep learning in the context of social network analysis. With the Internet becoming part of our everyday lives, social networking tools are used as the primary means of communication. And as the volume and speed of such data is increasing rapidly, there is a need to apply computational techniques to interpret and understand it. Moreover, relationships in molecular structures, co-authors in scientific journals, and developers in a software community can also be understood better by visualising them as networks. This book brings together the theory and practice of social network analysis and includes mathematical concepts, computational techniques and examples from the real world to offer readers an overview of this domain.




Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1


Book Description

The Handbook of Computational Social Science is a comprehensive reference source for scholars across multiple disciplines. It outlines key debates in the field, showcasing novel statistical modeling and machine learning methods, and draws from specific case studies to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges in CSS approaches. The Handbook is divided into two volumes written by outstanding, internationally renowned scholars in the field. This first volume focuses on the scope of computational social science, ethics, and case studies. It covers a range of key issues, including open science, formal modeling, and the social and behavioral sciences. This volume explores major debates, introduces digital trace data, reviews the changing survey landscape, and presents novel examples of computational social science research on sensing social interaction, social robots, bots, sentiment, manipulation, and extremism in social media. The volume not only makes major contributions to the consolidation of this growing research field but also encourages growth in new directions. With its broad coverage of perspectives (theoretical, methodological, computational), international scope, and interdisciplinary approach, this important resource is integral reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers engaging with computational methods across the social sciences, as well as those within the scientifi c and engineering sectors.