Workshop: Renmin University (Beijing)
International faculty and students met for one week at the School of Journalism and Communication of Renmin University to discuss modeling approaches to Big Data. The Annenberg team included professor Sandra González-Bailón and PhD students Jiaying Liu, Jingwen Zhang, Sijia Yang, and Bo Mai. Other invited international faculty included Javier Borge-Holthoefer, from the Qatar Computing Research Institute; Georgios Paltoglou, from Wolverhampton University; and Taha Yasseri, from the University of Oxford. The workshop consisted of faculty lectures and student presentations, and it included visits to the digital media companies Tencent and Baidu.
Course Development Grant
The Penn Social Science and Policy Forum just awarded us a grant to develop the course “The Theory of Networks: How Digital Technologies Shape Collective Behavior and Why it Matters”. Sandra González-Bailón and Victor Preciado will teach this course in Spring 2015.
Article: Bias in Online Networks
Abstract: We consider the sampling bias introduced in the study of online networks when collecting data through publicly available APIs (application programming interfaces). We assess differences between three samples of Twitter activity; the empirical context is given by political protests taking place in May 2012. We track online communication around these protests for the period of one month, and reconstruct the network of mentions and re-tweets according to the search and the streaming APIs, and to different filtering parameters. We find that smaller samples do not offer an accurate picture of peripheral activity; we also find that the bias is greater for the network of mentions, partly because of the higher influence of snowballing in identifying relevant nodes. We discuss the implications of this bias for the study of diffusion dynamics and political communication through social media, and advocate the need for more uniform sampling procedures to study online communication.
Book Review: Big Data
Talk: Amsterdam School of Communication
Sandra González-Bailón gave a talk at the Amsterdam School of Communication on “Communication Research in the Digital Era”.
Workshop: Big Data and Policy-Making
The second invitation-only workshop “Responsible Research Agendas for Public Policy in the Era of Big Data”, organized by the Oxford Internet Institute in conjunction with the journal Policy & Internet was held today at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC.
Talk: PolNet in Montreal
The VII Political Networks Conference took place at McGill University. Sandra González-Bailón presented the paper “The Emergence of Roles in Large-Scale Networks of Communication” (joint work with Javier Borge-Holthoefer and Ning Wang).
Book: Society and the Internet
The book Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing our Lives, edited by Mark Graham and Bill Dutton, is now out. It includes the chapter “Online Social Networks and Bottom-up Politics”, by Sandra González-Bailón.
Talks: ICA in Seattle
