6 research outputs found
Video Pandemics: Worldwide Viral Spreading of Psy's Gangnam Style Video
Viral videos can reach global penetration traveling through international
channels of communication similarly to real diseases starting from a
well-localized source. In past centuries, disease fronts propagated in a
concentric spatial fashion from the the source of the outbreak via the short
range human contact network. The emergence of long-distance air-travel changed
these ancient patterns. However, recently, Brockmann and Helbing have shown
that concentric propagation waves can be reinstated if propagation time and
distance is measured in the flight-time and travel volume weighted underlying
air-travel network. Here, we adopt this method for the analysis of viral meme
propagation in Twitter messages, and define a similar weighted network distance
in the communication network connecting countries and states of the World. We
recover a wave-like behavior on average and assess the randomizing effect of
non-locality of spreading. We show that similar result can be recovered from
Google Trends data as well.Comment: 10 page
Spatial Fingerprints of Community Structure in Human Interaction Network for an Extensive Set of Large-Scale Regions
Human interaction networks inferred from country-wide telephone
activity recordings were recently used to redraw political maps
by projecting their topological partitions into geographical
space. The results showed remarkable spatial cohesiveness of the
network communities and a significant overlap between the
redrawn and the administrative borders. Here we present a
similar analysis based on one of the most popular online social
networks represented by the ties between more than 5.8 million
of its geo-located users. The worldwide coverage of their
measured activity allowed us to analyze the large-scale regional
subgraphs of entire continents and an extensive set of examples
for single countries. We present results for North and South
America, Europe and Asia. In our analysis we used the well-
established method of modularity clustering after an aggregation
of the individual links into a weighted graph connecting equal-
area geographical pixels. Our results show fingerprints of both
of the opposing forces of dividing local conflicts and of
uniting cross-cultural trends of globalization