Analyzing the Social Web

By Jennifer Golbeck

Analyzing the Social Web provides a framework for the analysis of public data currently available and being generated by social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Access and analysis of this public data about people and their connections to one another allows for new applications of traditional social network analysis techniques that let us identify things like who are the most important or influential people in a network, how things will spread through the network, and the nature of peoples' relationships. Analyzing the Social Web introduces you to these techniques, shows you their application to many different types of social media, and discusses how social media can be used as a tool for interacting with the online public.

• Presents interactive social applications on the web, and the types of analysis that are currently conducted in the study of social media
• Covers the basics of network structures for beginners, including measuring methods for describing nodes, edges, and parts of the network
• Discusses the major categories of social media applications or phenomena and shows how the techniques presented can be applied to analyze and understand the underlying data
• Provides an introduction to information visualization, particularly network visualization techniques, and methods for using them to identify interesting features in a network, generate hypotheses for analysis, and recognize patterns of behavior
• Includes a supporting website with lecture slides, exercises, and downloadable social network data sets that can be used can be used to apply the techniques presented in the book

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Feb 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780124058569

Jennifer Golbeck

Jennifer Golbeck Ph.D Is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include social network and social media analysis, recommender systems, trust on the web, human computer interaction and and how to use social relationships to improve the way people interact with information. She was named as one of IEEE Intelligent System's "Top Ten to Watch", is a Research Fellow in the Web Science Research Initiative and is a sought after speaker on social media

Book preview

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Preface

The web has always been fast-growing, but for a decade, it was mostly a place where users only read content. Now, social features are present on many websites, and understanding users’ interactions is a complex and far-reaching topic. To cover all the interesting questions and methods of analysis would require volumes of text. At the core of all of these complex interactions are relationships that people have online, both directly with other people and through the content they create. The goal of this book is to introduce techniques for analyzing those social relationships.

Online relationships form rich networks, and many fields of study have methods for analyzing them. Math, computer science, sociology, biology, information studies, business, and others have solid, systematic methods for understanding networks in one form or another. To really understand the networks found on the social web, tools from all these traditions are necessary.

Until now, no textbook had been published that integrated all these approaches. An instructor trying to teach a course on analyzing social media networks was forced to either focus on only one or two related types of analysis or to assemble readings from many diverse sources. Although the latter approach has the benefit of a broader scope, it can lead to redundancy and a loss of context around ideas. That makes it harder to understand the background, motivation, and application of each technique.

I experienced this problem in my own classes that I have taught on this subject. After several semesters of trying different approaches, I found the best solution was to write my own text for the class, which I supplemented with other readings for each lesson. This worked better for students and made it easier to teach.

The job market increasingly demands that students have expertise in analyzing social media, and social networks and social media are hot areas of research across academia. As a result, more and more courses are being created in universities to teach these skills. Based on my experiences teaching these courses, I decided to write this