16,566 research outputs found
From coincidence to purposeful flow? properties of transcendental information cascades
In this paper, we investigate a method for constructing cascades of information co-occurrence, which is suitable to trace emergent structures in information in scenarios where rich contextual features are unavailable. Our method relies only on the temporal order of content-sharing activities, and intrinsic properties of the shared content itself. We apply this method to analyse information dissemination patterns across the active online citizen science project Planet Hunters, a part of the Zooniverse platform. Our results lend insight into both structural and informational properties of different types of identifiers that can be used and combined to construct cascades. In particular, significant differences are found in the structural properties of information cascades when hashtags as used as cascade identifiers, compared with other content features. We also explain apparent local information losses in cascades in terms of information obsolescence and cascade divergence; e.g., when a cascade branches into multiple, divergent cascades with combined capacity equal to the original
When resources collide: Towards a theory of coincidence in information spaces
This paper is an attempt to lay out foundations for a general theory of coincidence in information spaces such as the World Wide Web, expanding on existing work on bursty structures in document streams and information cascades. We elaborate on the hypothesis that every resource that is published in an information space, enters a temporary interaction with another resource once a unique explicit or implicit reference between the two is found. This thought is motivated by Erwin Shroedingers notion of entanglement between quantum systems. We present a generic information cascade model that exploits only the temporal order of information sharing activities, combined with inherent properties of the shared information resources. The approach was applied to data from the world's largest online citizen science platform Zooniverse and we report about findings of this case study
Characterizing Attention Cascades in WhatsApp Groups
An important political and social phenomena discussed in several countries,
like India and Brazil, is the use of WhatsApp to spread false or misleading
content. However, little is known about the information dissemination process
in WhatsApp groups. Attention affects the dissemination of information in
WhatsApp groups, determining what topics or subjects are more attractive to
participants of a group. In this paper, we characterize and analyze how
attention propagates among the participants of a WhatsApp group. An attention
cascade begins when a user asserts a topic in a message to the group, which
could include written text, photos, or links to articles online. Others then
propagate the information by responding to it. We analyzed attention cascades
in more than 1.7 million messages posted in 120 groups over one year. Our
analysis focused on the structural and temporal evolution of attention cascades
as well as on the behavior of users that participate in them. We found specific
characteristics in cascades associated with groups that discuss political
subjects and false information. For instance, we observe that cascades with
false information tend to be deeper, reach more users, and last longer in
political groups than in non-political groups.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 11th International ACM Web Science
Conference (WebSci 2019). Please cite the WebSci versio
Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events
The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development
of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics.
Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital
boundaries is still an open challenge. Here we show that online social
interactions during a massive voting event can be used to build an accurate map
of real-world political parties and electoral ranks. We provide evidence that
information flow and collective attention are often driven by a special class
of highly influential users, that we name "augmented humans", who exploit
thousands of automated agents, also known as bots, for enhancing their online
influence. We show that augmented humans generate deep information cascades, to
the same extent of news media and other broadcasters, while they uniformly
infiltrate across the full range of identified groups. Digital augmentation
represents the cyber-physical counterpart of the human desire to acquire power
within social systems.Comment: 11 page
Communities, Knowledge Creation, and Information Diffusion
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute
to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit
from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more
information of better quality in a timely fashion, and by presiding over
communication between collaborators. Here we focus on the tendency of
scientists to cluster into tightly-knit communities, and discuss the
implications of this tendency for scientific performance. We begin by reviewing
a new method for finding communities, and we then assess its benefits in terms
of computation time and accuracy. While communities often serve as a taxonomic
scheme to map knowledge domains, they also affect how successfully scientists
engage in the creation of new knowledge. By drawing on the longstanding debate
on the relative benefits of social cohesion and brokerage, we discuss the
conditions that facilitate collaborations among scientists within or across
communities. We show that successful scientific production occurs within
communities when scientists have cohesive collaborations with others from the
same knowledge domain, and across communities when scientists intermediate
among otherwise disconnected collaborators from different knowledge domains. We
also discuss the implications of communities for information diffusion, and
show how traditional epidemiological approaches need to be refined to take
knowledge heterogeneity into account and preserve the system's ability to
promote creative processes of novel recombinations of idea
Efficiency of Human Activity on Information Spreading on Twitter
Understanding the collective reaction to individual actions is key to
effectively spread information in social media. In this work we define
efficiency on Twitter, as the ratio between the emergent spreading process and
the activity employed by the user. We characterize this property by means of a
quantitative analysis of the structural and dynamical patterns emergent from
human interactions, and show it to be universal across several Twitter
conversations. We found that some influential users efficiently cause
remarkable collective reactions by each message sent, while the majority of
users must employ extremely larger efforts to reach similar effects. Next we
propose a model that reproduces the retweet cascades occurring on Twitter to
explain the emergent distribution of the user efficiency. The model shows that
the dynamical patterns of the conversations are strongly conditioned by the
topology of the underlying network. We conclude that the appearance of a small
fraction of extremely efficient users results from the heterogeneity of the
followers network and independently of the individual user behavior.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure
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