Title
Reading the source code of social ties
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2615569.2615672
WebSci
Keywords
DocType
Volume
computational sociology,human factors,social exchange,anobii,domains of interaction,flickr
Journal
abs/1407.5547
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.73
27
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Maria Aiello171344.77
Rossano Schifanella2121.12
Bogdan State3614.72