As Time Goes by: Discovering Eras in Evolving Social Networks Authors(s): Michele Berlingerio, Michele Coscia, Fosca Giannotti, Anna Monreale, Dino Pedreschi
Abstract:
Within the large body of research in complex network analysis, an important topic is the temporal evolution of networks. Existing approaches aim at analyzing the evolution on the global and the local scale, extracting properties of either the entire network or local patterns. In this paper, we focus instead on detecting clusters of temporal snapshots of a network, to be interpreted as eras of evolution. To this aim, we introduce a novel hierarchical clustering methodology, based on a dissimilarity measure (derived from the Jaccard coefficient) between two temporal snapshots of the network. We devise a framework to discover and browse the eras, either in top-down or a bottom-up fashion, supporting the exploration of the evolution at any level of temporal resolution. We show how our approach applies to real networks, by detecting eras in an evolving co-authorship graph extracted from a bibliographic dataset; we illustrate how the discovered temporal clustering highlights the crucial moments when the network had profound changes in its structure. Our approach is finally boosted by introducing a meaningful labeling of the obtained clusters, such as the characterizing topics of each discovered era, thus adding a semantic dimension to our analysis.
Deeply interesting work.
Questions:
- Is is a fair assumption that terms used by one scholar will be used the same way by scholars that cite them? (discussion)
- If you think #1 is true, then does entity resolution, etc., however you want to talk about recognition of subjects, apply from the first scholar outwards? If so, how far? (discussion)
- If you think #1 is false, why? (discussion)
- How would you go about designing a project to identify usages of terms in a body of literature? Such that you could detect changes in usage? What questions would you have to ask? (3-5 pages, citations)
PS: Another way to think about this area is: Do terms have social lives? Is that a useful way to talk about them?