Bogdan State

The Mesh of Civilizations in the Global Network of Digital Communication

Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington’s theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded that the axes of international geo-political conflicts had reverted to the ancient cultural divisions that had characterized most of human history. Until recently, however, the debate has had to rely more on polemics than empirical evidence. Moreover, Huntington made this prediction in 1993, before social media connected the world’s population. Do digital communications attenuate or echo the cultural, religious, and ethnic “fault lines” posited by Huntington prior to the global diffusion of social media? We revisit Huntingtons thesis using hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map the global alignment of interpersonal relations. Contrary to the supposedly borderless world of cyberspace, a bottom-up analysis confirms the persistence of the eight culturally differentiated civilizations posited by Huntington, with the divisions corresponding to differences in language, religion, economic development, and spatial distance.

Disenchanting the World: The Impact of Technology on Relationships

We explore the impact of technology on the strength of friendship ties. Data come from about two millions ties that members of CouchSurfing—an international hospitality organization whose goal is to promote travelling and friendship between its members—developed between 2003 and 2011 as well as original and secondary ethnographic data. The community, and the data available about its members, grew exponentially during our period of analysis, yet friendships between users tended to be stronger in the early years of CouchSurfing, when the online reputation system was still developing and the whole network was enmeshed in considerable uncertainty. We argue that this case illustrates a process of disenchantment created by technology, where technology increases the ease with which we form friendships around common cultural interests and, at the same time, diminishes the bonding power of these experiences.

Migration of Professionals to the U.S. Evidence from LinkedIn data

We investigate trends in the international migration of professional workers by analyzing a dataset of millions of geolocated career histories provided by LinkedIn, the largest online platform for professionals. The new dataset confirms that the United States is, in absolute terms, the top destination for international migrants. However, we observe a decrease, from 2000 to 2012, in the percentage of professional migrants, worldwide, who have the United States as their country of destination. The pattern holds for persons with Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees alike, and for individuals with degrees from highly-ranked worldwide universities. Our analysis also reveals the growth of Asia as a major professional migration destination during the past twelve years. Although we see a decline in the share of employment-based migrants going to the United States, our results show a recent rebound in the percentage of international students who choose the United States as their destination.

Reading the source code of social ties

Though online social network research has exploded during the past years, not much thought has been given to the exploration of the nature of social links. Online interactions have been interpreted as indicative of one social process or another (e.g., status exchange or trust), often with little systematic justification regarding the relation between observed data and theoretical concept. Our research aims to breach this gap in computational social science by proposing an unsupervised, parameter-free method to discover, with high accuracy, the fundamental domains of interaction occurring in social networks. By applying this method on two online datasets different by scope and type of interaction (aNobii and Flickr) we observe the spontaneous emergence of three domains of interaction representing the exchange of status, knowledge and social support. By finding significant relations between the domains of interaction and classic social network analysis issues (e.g., tie strength, dyadic interaction over time) we show how the network of interactions induced by the extracted domains can be used as a starting point for more nuanced analysis of online social data that may one day incorporate the normative grammar of social interaction. Our methods finds applications in online social media services ranging from recommendation to visual link summarization.

Digital Demography

Demography is the science of human populations and, at its most basic, focuses on the processes of (i) fertility, (ii) mortality and (iii) mobility. Whereas modern states are typically in a reasonable position to keep records on both fertility and mortality, through birth and death registrations, as well as through censuses, measuring the mobility of populations represents a particular challenge due to reasons ranging from inconsistencies in official definitions across countries, to the difficulty of quantifying illegal migration. At the same time, mere numbers, whether on births, deaths or migration events, shed little light on the underlying causes, hence providing insufficient information to policy makers. The use of digital methods and data sources, ranging from social media data to web search logs, offers possibilities to address some of the challenges of traditional demography by (i) improving existing statistics or helping to create new ones, and (ii) enriching statistics by providing context related to the drivers of demographic changes. This tutorial will help to familiarize participants with research in this area. First, we will give an overview of fundamental concepts in demographic research including the population equation. We also showcase traditional data collection and analysis methods such as census microdata, the construction of a basic life table, panel datasets and survival analysis. In the second part, we present a number of studies that have tried to overcome limitations of traditional approaches by using innovative methods and data sources ranging from geo-tagged tweets to online genealogy. We will put particular emphasis on (i) methodological challenges such as issues related to bias, as well as on (ii) how to collect open data from the World Wide Web. The slides and other material for this tutorial are available at https://sites.google.com/site/digitaldemography/.

What’s in a Dyad? Interaction and exchange in social media - Introduction

Scientists are now on the cusp of gaining a computational understanding of social interaction by means of online conversational data in the form of blog posts, emails exchange, comments threads, or interest-based discussions. Online interactions can be conceptualized as a social exchange, and also as a process from which meaning emerges through dialogue between the two partners. This workshop creates an interdisciplinary venue for plentiful dialogue and exchange that aims to shed light at the understanding of social structure through a computational focus on the mechanics of the dyad.