11 research outputs found
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