[Air-L] Tastes, Ties, and Time: Facebook data release (and some reactions)

[Michael Zimmer]

I don't think this has been posted here: the first wave of a Facebook  
dataset from a university cohort has been released. Details below

(And both Fred Stutzman and myself have commented on possible privacy  
concerns that still remain despite the researchers' best efforts.  
Links at the very bottom of this message - anyone else react to this?)

-mz

--
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org

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Tastes, Ties, and Time: Facebook data release
September 25, 2008
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/4682

In collaboration with Harvard sociology graduate students Kevin Lewis  
and Marco Gonzalez, and with UCLA professor Andreas Wimmer and Harvard  
professor Nicholas Christakis, Berkman Fellow Jason Kaufman has made  
available a first wave of Facebook.com data through the Dataverse  
Network Project.

The dataset comprises machine-readable files of virtually all the  
information posted on approximately 1,700 FB profiles by an entire  
cohort of students at an anonymous, northeastern American university.  
Profiles were sampled at one-year intervals, beginning in 2006. This  
first wave covers first-year profiles, and three additional waves of  
data will be added over time, one for each year of the cohort's  
college career.

Though friendships outside the cohort are not part of the data, this  
snapshot of an entire class over its four years in college, including  
supplementary information about where students lived on campus, makes  
it possible to pose diverse questions about the relationships between  
social networks, online and offline.

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* Stutzman's reaction: <http://fstutzman.com/2008/09/29/facebook-datasets-and-private-chrome/#comment-2489 
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* Zimmer's reaction: <http://michaelzimmer.org/2008/09/30/on-the-anonymity-of-the-facebook-dataset/ 
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