137,086 research outputs found
A Twitter Social Network analysis based on graph and network theory : the South African Health Insurance Bill Case
Abstract:Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the process of extricating relationships and interchanges among firms, individuals and connected information objects by way of visual mapping. Through the lenses of graph theory and network theory, this study aims to explore the Twitter social media network shortly after the introduction of the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill to the South African parliament was announced for debate. In graph theory, algorithms are used to extract knowledge and efficient visualisation techniques to represent, for the purpose of this study, pairwise relations between objects, namely Twitter data. An instrumental, single case study design and SNA (based on network theory principles) secured contextual and timely Twitter interchanges of 4 112 tweets of the hashtag “NHI”. The uniqueness of this inquiry is the use of the ‘Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel Pro’ (NodeXL Pro) tool for social media analytics to simplify the Twitter SNA tasks and analysis of the #NHI twitter social media network. The findings explain the data dispersion and network structure of the #NHI case. The significance of the study is that the SNA clearly identifies the influencers, popular Twitter users and gatekeepers in the announcement of a highly controversial healthcare bill that will affect all South African citizens
Society seen through the prism of space: outline of a theory of society and space
Two questions challenge the student of space and society above all others: will new technologies
change the spatial basis of society ? And if so, will this have an impact on society itself ?
For the urbanist, these two questions crystallise into one: what will the future of cities have
to do with their past ? Too often these questions are dealt with as though they were only
matters of technology. But they are much more than that. They are deep and difficult questions
about the interdependence of technology, space and society that we do not yet have the
theoretical apparatus to answer. We know that previous �revolutions� in technology such as
agriculture, urbanism and industrialisation associated radical changes in space with no less
radical changes in social institutions. But we do not know how far these linkages were
contingent or necessary. We do not, in short, have a theory of society and space adequate to
account for where we are now, and therefore we have no reasonable theoretical base for
speculating about the future. In this paper, I suggest that a major reason for this theoretical
deficit is that most previous attempts to build a theory of society and space have looked at
society and tried to find space in its output. The result has been that the constructive role of
space in creating and and sustaining society has not been brought to the fore, or if it has, only
in a way which is too general to permit the detailed specification of mechanisms. In this
paper I try to reverse the normal order of things this by looking first at space and trying the
discern society through space: by looking at society through the prism of space. Through this
I try to define key mechanisms linking space to society and then use these to suggest how the
questions about the future of cities and societies might be better defined
Modeling social networks from sampled data
Network models are widely used to represent relational information among
interacting units and the structural implications of these relations. Recently,
social network studies have focused a great deal of attention on random graph
models of networks whose nodes represent individual social actors and whose
edges represent a specified relationship between the actors. Most inference for
social network models assumes that the presence or absence of all possible
links is observed, that the information is completely reliable, and that there
are no measurement (e.g., recording) errors. This is clearly not true in
practice, as much network data is collected though sample surveys. In addition
even if a census of a population is attempted, individuals and links between
individuals are missed (i.e., do not appear in the recorded data). In this
paper we develop the conceptual and computational theory for inference based on
sampled network information. We first review forms of network sampling designs
used in practice. We consider inference from the likelihood framework, and
develop a typology of network data that reflects their treatment within this
frame. We then develop inference for social network models based on information
from adaptive network designs. We motivate and illustrate these ideas by
analyzing the effect of link-tracing sampling designs on a collaboration
network.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOAS221 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
A survey of statistical network models
Networks are ubiquitous in science and have become a focal point for
discussion in everyday life. Formal statistical models for the analysis of
network data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of
study, and most of these involve a form of graphical representation.
Probability models on graphs date back to 1959. Along with empirical studies in
social psychology and sociology from the 1960s, these early works generated an
active network community and a substantial literature in the 1970s. This effort
moved into the statistical literature in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the past
decade has seen a burgeoning network literature in statistical physics and
computer science. The growth of the World Wide Web and the emergence of online
networking communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, and a host of
more specialized professional network communities has intensified interest in
the study of networks and network data. Our goal in this review is to provide
the reader with an entry point to this burgeoning literature. We begin with an
overview of the historical development of statistical network modeling and then
we introduce a number of examples that have been studied in the network
literature. Our subsequent discussion focuses on a number of prominent static
and dynamic network models and their interconnections. We emphasize formal
model descriptions, and pay special attention to the interpretation of
parameters and their estimation. We end with a description of some open
problems and challenges for machine learning and statistics.Comment: 96 pages, 14 figures, 333 reference
An investigation of the relation of space to society: a discussion on A. Giddens, H. Lefebvre and space syntax
This thesis is dealing with the relation of society and space as a main characteristic for elucidating the design process. More particular is based on the problem which appears both in spatial and social theories of relating entities which ‘are in different scales’. This is the relation of space, which is a local notion, to society, which is a global idea or the relation of society to the everyday life, which is also local and spatial.
Thιs thesis attempts to investigate the relation of society to space through this core problem by examining three theories which seem to deal with this issue. These are the Space Syntax Theory of Hillier and Hanson, the Structuration theory of Giddens and the theory of the Production of Space of Lefebvre. The first has an architectural and urban point of view of the matter, the second a sociological and the third a politico-economic.
The discussion of the three theories shows that all three grasp an interrelation between society and space although each theory sees this interrelation in a different way. For the Structuration theory space has an important role in the structuration of society, for Space Syntax a constructive role of the generic forms of society and for Lefebvre an instrumental character
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