Communications of the ACM
What Social Media Data Could Tell US About the Future
Northeastern University researchers are working with a group of scientists to develop a method to map how tweets about large-scale social events spread.
Credit: YoungHee Jang/Northeastern University
Northeastern University researchers are working with a group of scientists to develop a method to map how tweets about large-scale social events spread.
Knowing the characteristics of that buildup could enable researchers to prepare ahead of time for undesirable repercussions from such events, says Nicola Perra, a former research associate at Northeastern's Network Science Institute.
"What we are trying to understand is the presence of precursors: can we find a signal in the flow of information that will tell us something big is about to happen?" asks Northeastern professor Alessandro Vespignani.
The researchers used network modeling in neuroscience to conduct the study, having nodes represent cities and the links represent the pathways the tweets take over time.
For example, in 2011, Spanish protests sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S., and the tweets gained in volume and intensity until they reached a "social tipping point of collective phenomenon" on May 20, 2011.
"You create a system that starts from a few nodes that then drive others, and so on, until everybody is talking to everybody else in a full coordination of the information," Vespignani says.
The researchers focused their study on the 2011 protest in Spain, the Brazilian Autumn protest in 2013, the release of a Hollywood blockbuster movie in 2012, and Google's acquisition of Motorola in 2014.
From Northeastern University News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found