[Air-L] Social network site nomenclature

[Sarita Yardi]

Researchers from data mining and networking (capital N) communities tend to
use the term "online social networks" fairly consistently. They are (in
general, not always) measuring and analyzing networks as nodes and links and
describing how information flows within them--they're less focused on the
social layer.  For this context, "online social networks" seems pretty
appropriate and sufficient.

Some examples are SIGCOMM's 2008 and 2009 "Workshop on Online Social
Networks", Chau et al.'s WWW '07 "Parallel crawling for online social
networks" , Mislove et al.'s IMC '07 "Measurement and analysis of online
social networks", Kumar et al.'s KDD '06 "Structure and evolution of online
social networks", etc, you get the idea.




----
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/%7Eyardi>


On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 7:06 PM, Robert Ackland
<robert.ackland at anu.edu.au>wrote:

> I want to comment on the reference to "network science" below.
>
> I guess there will be quite a few people on Air-L who like me, are also on
> the SOCNET list run by the International Network for Social Network Analysis
> (INSNA).
>
> I study and teach about online social and organisational networks and a
> major influence on my work is social network analysis (SNA).  SNA is not a
> sub-field of network science.  Network science is primarily identified with
> applied physics, while SNA comes out of sociology.  There has been some
> cross-over between network science and SNA and interestingly, there has been
> significant movement of ideas from SNA to network science.  For example, in
> relation to centrality in networks - see "Going the Wrong Way on a One-Way
> Street: Centrality in Physics and Biology" by Linton Freeman,
> http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume9/Freeman/.  As pointed out
> by Freeman, often the direction of ideas goes the other way: from natural
> science to social science.
>
> I feel it is important to recognise the disciplinary differences in how
> networks are analysed - different theoretical models, different analytical
> approaches (although with useful cross-over).  I guess I'm concerned to see
> "network science" used as an umbrella term as it really does refer a
> particular disciplinary perspective.  I have similar reservations about "web
> science".
>
> Best regards,
> Rob
>
>
> Caroline Haythornthwaite wrote:
>
>> As one who tries to make a clear distinction between "social networks" and
>> "social networking", let me see if this distinction makes sense to others.
>>
>> Social networks are created and maintained by ties between people. They
>> are studied using social network analysis, a formal set of techniques now
>> being more widely used and identified under the label of "network science".
>> There is no online or offline separation for social networks -- they exist,
>> emerge and are maintained based on ties between people whether these happen
>> via online and/or offline means.
>>
> > --------------------------------------
> > Caroline Haythornthwaite
> > Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University
> of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 East Daniel St., Champaign IL 61820
> > haythorn at illinois.edu OR haythorn at uiuc.edu
>
> -------------------------------------
> Dr Robert Ackland
> Fellow and Masters Coordinator, Australian Demographic and Social Research
> Institute, The Australian National University
>
> e-mail:   robert.ackland at anu.edu.au
> homepage: http://adsri.anu.edu.au/people/robert.php
> project:  http://voson.anu.edu.au
> teaching: http://adsri.anu.edu.au/study/ssi.php
> -------------------------------------
>
>
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