Incremental communication patterns in online social groups

Abstract

In the last decades, temporal networks played a key role in modelling, understanding, and analysing the properties of dynamic systems where individuals and events vary in time. Of paramount importance is the representation and the analysis of Social Media, in particular Social Networks and Online Communities, through temporal networks, due to their intrinsic dynamism (social ties, online/offline status, users’ interactions, etc..). The identification of recurrent patterns in Online Communities, and in detail in Online Social Groups, is an important challenge which can reveal information concerning the structure of the social network, but also patterns of interactions, trending topics, and so on. Different works have already investigated the pattern detection in several scenarios by focusing mainly on identifying the occurrences of fixed and well known motifs (mostly, triads) or more flexible subgraphs. In this paper, we present the concept on the Incremental Communication Patterns, which is something in-between motifs, from which they inherit the meaningfulness of the identified structure, and subgraph, from which they inherit the possibility to be extended as needed. We formally define the Incremental Communication Patterns and exploit them to investigate the interaction patterns occurring in a real dataset consisting of 17 Online Social Groups taken from the list of Facebook groups. The results regarding our experimental analysis uncover interesting aspects of interactions patterns occurring in social groups and reveal that Incremental Communication Patterns are able to capture roles of the users within the groups.

Dyads, triads, and tetrads: a multivariate simulation approach to uncovering network motifs in social graphs

“…Theories of balance (Cartwright and Harary 1956;Heider 1946) suggest that tendencies towards transitivity would supersede other social phenomena, like the propensity for well-connected individuals to become increasingly central over time. Applying temporal motifs (Paranjape et al 2017) to investigate sequential, communication patterns (Michienzi et al 2021;Zignani et al 2018), for example, could be helpful in addressing these issues.…”

“…In recent years, a veritable industry of research has arisen in which commonly occurring network motifs form the focus of study. Motif research, per se, often concentrates on interconnections that are biological or physical, with less attention to social science methods and theory until recently (e.g., Cunningham et al 2013;Gu et al 2019;Michienzi et al 2021;Zignani et al 2018). Nevertheless, certain motifs may be universal across a variety of domains, but this remains unclear.…”

Impact of second-order network motif on online social networks

“…To understand the behaviour of interaction patterns between the users in a network, a network motif plays an important role [27]. Many small sub-graphs of OSNs are significant in representing the fundamental topological communication patterns of the OSNs [24]. To uncover these structural interaction patterns, the network motif is an important tool.…”

“…In OSNs, some users' interest is on both message passing and receiving and some users are close to each other so after getting the messages they reply. Using communication pattern findings, the overall behaviour of the information diffusion process in the network can be recognized [24]. To identify the message spreading patterns, basic communication pattern mining of a user is necessary.…”

Small-scale food producers in Serbia: The use of Facebook in the market

“…Будући да се у тексту фокусирамо на тематску анализу комуникације у оквиру конкретне фејсбук групе, а не на опште карактеристике фејсбук комуникације, изостављамо информације о томе. О истраживањима, значају, карактеристикама и распрострањености фејсбук комуникације опширније у: Goulart & Gollner, 2012;Di Capua, 2012;Caers, Feyter, De Couck, Stough, Vigna & Du Bois, 2013;Joo & Teng, 2017;Michienzi, Guidi & De Salve, 2021. Фејсбук група "Мали произвођачи хране у Србији" је покренута у септембру 2019. године и за две године постојања је успела да окупи више од 110.000 чланова (произвођача и потенцијалних потрошача). Број чланова групе се свакодневно повећава, чиме се интензивира и комуникација унутар групе.…”