On Tuesday, February 5, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m, the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) will host Anatoliy Gruzd, Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University for his talk “Automated Discovery and Visualization of Communication Networks from Social Media” in Room 461 of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
As social creatures, our online lives just like our offline lives are intertwined with others within a wide variety of social networks. Each retweet on Twitter, comment on a blog or link to a Youtube video explicitly or implicitly connects one online participant to another and contributes to the formation of various information and social networks. Once discovered, these networks can provide researchers with an effective mechanism for identifying and studying collaborative processes within any online community. However, collecting information about online networks using traditional methods such as surveys can be very time consuming and expensive. The presentation will explore automated ways to discover and analyze various information and social networks from social media data.
About the speaker: Anatoliy Gruzd is Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management and Director of the Social Media Lab at Dalhousie University. His research initiatives explore how social media and other web 2.0 technologies are changing the ways in which people disseminate knowledge and information and how these changes are impacting social, economic and political norms and structures of our modern society. Dr. Gruzd is also actively developing and testing new web tools and apps for discovering and visualizing information and online social networks. The broad aim of his various research initiatives is to provide decision makers with additional knowledge and insights into the behaviors and relationships of online network members, and to understand how these interpersonal connections influence our personal choices and actions.