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Recent Comments
- Re: Datamining facebook
By: Bertil Hatt
Date: Dec 19, 2007 9:20 PM
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« comments on computational social science... | Main | baseball networks »
19 December 2007
Datamining facebook
Apropos computational social science, there have been a couple of articles on using facebook for social science research, one on Sunday in the Washington Post, and one on Monday (front page) in the New York Times.
An excerpt from the New York Times article:
To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.
“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.
“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.” [emphasis mine]
Facebook is an example par excellence of the emergent media that facilitate communication, but also leave a wonderful record for researchers to mine. The interesting question is how to design research so as to pull apart exactly the causal conundrum Kaufman mentions (the coevolution problem I have written about). How does one pull apart shared histories (which may be correlated with the network) from diffusion, for example? Observing, for example, things diffuse through facebook does not tell us, necessarily, that it is the network driving that diffusion, because there may be shared exposure to things like marketing. In any case, the facebook offers new vistas in terms of pulling these things apart.
Posted by David Lazer at December 19, 2007 10:43 AM
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Comments
Social networks with public conversation, or more generally digital communication traces [Insert big, bold, red warning about privacy here] allow to look into the content of conversation, and track elements. URLs in blogs is a good example -- one that can be automated, hence the privacy somewhat preserved.
One can also imagine offering a new service, send access codes that can be shared, and monitor actual diffusions this way. Would you be interested in such approaches?
Posted by: Bertil Hatt at December 19, 2007 9:20 PM