Josh Becker, DiMeNet member, will be presenting a paper and a poster in two forthcoming conferences:

• Becker, J. Collective Decisions as Coordination Processes – The Influence of Hubs. Computational Social Science Summit. Evanston, IL. May 2015.
• Becker, J. Complex Coordination: The Influence of Hubs on Collective Outcomes. NetSci. Zaragoza, Spain. June, 2015.

Sijia Yang has been awarded a fellowship to attend the 2015 Political Networks Conference. He will discuss his work on “Semantic Networks and Public Opinion”, forthcoming as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks.

Vice’s Motherboard interviewed DiMeNet member Tim Libert last week about his research on third-party tracking. Libert found that 91 percent of health related web pages initiate HTTP requests to third-parties. “This isn’t just commercial sites who need to turn a profit, these are organizations you trust: the government, non-profits, universities,” said Libert.

The paper “Network Effects in the Academic Market: Mechanisms for Hiring and Placing Ph.D.s in Communication (2007-2014)” has been accepted at this year’s International Communication Association conference, to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. DiMeNet member Bo Mai will be presenting the research.

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Abstract: We analyze hiring and placement dynamics across communication Ph.D. programs using data collected in 2014. We assess changes compared to data collected in 2007 (as reported in Barnett, Danowski, Feeley, & Stalker, 2010), and we identify the factors that underlie the formation of recruitment ties. Our findings challenge prior conclusions that faculty-hiring patterns offer a good proxy to the quality of doctoral education. Instead, we find evidence that the recruitment network results from inter-organizational dynamics that are likely to emerge from faculty mobility; these dynamics are manifested in the form of reciprocity, transitivity, and cumulative advantage. Once we control for these network characteristics, institutional prestige, faculty seniority, and reputational rankings modestly drive the formation of recruitment ties.

Mason Porter will be visiting the DiMeNet group next week. He will give a talk on multilayer networks on Monday 15 Dec at 10:00am in room 224.

Abstract: Communication through social media mediates coordination and information diffusion across a range of social settings. However, online networks are large and complex, and their analysis requires new methods to summarize their structure and identify nodes holding relevant positions. We propose a method that generalizes the sociological theory of brokerage, originally devised on the basis of local transitivity and paths of length two, to make it applicable to larger, more complex structures. Our method makes use of the modular structure of networks to define brokerage at the local and global levels. We test the method with two different data sets. The findings show that our approach is better at capturing role differences than alternative approaches that only consider local or global network features.

A review of the book Networked. The New Social Operating System, by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman is out in Information, Communication & Society.