2008 TheStructureofInformationPathwa

(Kossinets et al., 2008) ⇒ Gueorgi Kossinets, Jon Kleinberg, and Duncan Watts. (2008). “The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network.” In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2008). doi:10.1145/1401890.1401945

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Abstract

Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics of communication using on-line data, including e-mail communication among the faculty and staff of a large university over a two-year period. We formulate a temporal notion of "distance" in the underlying social network by measuring the minimum time required for information to spread from one node to another - a concept that draws on the notion of vector-clocks from the study of distributed computing systems. We find that such temporal measures provide structural insights that are not apparent from analyses of the pure social network topology. In particular, we define the network backbone to be the subgraph consisting of edges on which information has the potential to flow the quickest. We find that the backbone is a sparse graph with a concentration of both highly embedded edges and long-range bridges - a finding that sheds new light on the relationship between tie strength and connectivity in social networks.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2008 TheStructureofInformationPathwa	Jon Kleinberg Gueorgi Kossinets Duncan Watts			The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network				10.1145/1401890.1401945