Blogs and Journalists: From Online Communities to Social Media
Detecting Communities in Science Blogs
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Transcript of Detecting Communities in Science Blogs
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Detecting Communitiesin Science Blogs
Christina K. [email protected]
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~cpikas/ScienceBlogging
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Problem Area
• eScience includes using electronic tools both for conducting science and for communicating about science
• There are an abundance of tools both online and offline to help scientists communicate
• Lots of scientists and members of the interested public maintain blogs (~2500?)
• Ultimate Questions:Why? With whom are scientists communicating? What are scientists communicating about? What is the value to the scientists and to science?
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Specific Problem Addressed
• What is the nature of the science blogosphere?– What is its shape?– Who are the central participants?– What is the connectivity?– Where are the potential information flows?
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Outline
•Background
•Methods–Data gathering
–Analysis
•Results
•Discussion
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Background: Blogs
• Defined by format– Individual posts, with permanent URLs– Comments
• Links– In content– In blogroll– In comments and trackbacks
• Community develops around single blogs and among blogs through commenting
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Posts
Links to StaticPages
Links and automatically generated content
http://dorigo.wordpress.com/
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Access to posts by search and older posts using the calendar
A list of most recent posts is automatically generated
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A list of categories the blogger used to describe his posts. Clicking will list all of the posts in that category.
The blogroll is a list of blogs the author reads or endorses to some extent.
Access to the older posts by month.
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The individual post page looks a lot like the blog home page
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But with Comments, which may be signed with thethe commenter’s URL
And a form to leave your own comment. Typically your e-mail will not appear on the site
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Background: Social Network Analysis
• Uses connections between actors to understand potential flows of informationand influence
• Uses graph theoretic methods to find– Central or prestigious actors– Cohesive subgroups including communities
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Methods: Sample Selection
Operational Definition of Science Blog
• Blogs maintained by scientists that deal with any aspect of being a scientist
• Blogs about scientific topics by non-scientists
Omitted
• Primarily political speech
• Ones maintained by corporations
• Non-English language
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Methods: Data Gathering
• Two Networks: Links and Commenters
• Link Data (Blogroll)– Used seed list developed in previous study
using directories and searches
– Snowball sampled using links from blogrolls
– Visited and copied links
• Commenter Data– Selected most central blogs from blogroll data
– Used Perl scripts to pull the commenter URLs from each of the last 10 posts
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Methods: Analysis
• Used social network analysis and graphing software
• Examined graph and calculated basic descriptive statistics
• Found centrality and prestige measures–Degree: the links in and out
–Betweenness: the number of shortest paths that flow through that node
–Closeness: short paths to other nodes
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Methods: Analysis
Located cohesive subgroups
• Link methods– Components
– LS Sets
• Clustering methods
• Community detection techniques– Newman-Girvan
– Spin Glass
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Results: Link Analysis (Blogroll)
• One large component
• There were 1091 nodes, 6621 arcs
• Diameter is 9
• In-degree ranges from 1 to 292, with the median in-degree of 3, and mean 6
– 10 of the top 20 blogs by in-degree are authored or co-authored by women
– 4 of the top 5 blogs by closeness are authored or co-authored by women
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Results: Commenter
• 5 components, the largest with 911, others with 11 or fewer nodes
• 938 nodes (starting with the 46), 1152 arcs
• The largest component has a diameter of 5
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Discussion: Links (Blogroll)
• Most of the blogs were connected in one dense component
– A result of the diffusion of blogs?
• There were a few very central blogs, and then many less central
– Typical skewed distribution
• The community of women scientists merits further study
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Discussion: Commenters
• Analysis easily located a notorious commenter who leaves incendiary comments on physics and chemistry blogs– High out-degree, no links in
• Traffic on the women scientist blogs is more uniform, with frequent comments that are widely distributed among the blogs– Indicates a different use
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Take Home Messages
• The science blogosphere is densely connected with many opportunities for influence and information diffusion
• Communities tend to form within disciplinary boundaries
• An exception is the community of women scientist bloggers who are from many different disciplines
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Acknowledgements
• Thanks to Dr. Jen Golbeck for supervising this work as part of an independent study
• Thanks also to– Dr. Alan Neustadtl for SNA advice– Dr. Dagobert Soergel for research advice
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Christina K. Pikas
Doctoral Student
University of Maryland
College of Information Studies
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~cpikas/ScienceBlogging