Online communities involve lots of interactions among members. Those interactions are usually shown as “friend links” between community members, and an online community could be seen as a network of members. The structures and properties of community network formed are important to the information diffusion in communities. Hence, the network formation mechanisms attract great interest in recent...

Communities are the latest phenomena on the Internet. At the heart of each community lies a social network. In this paper, we show a generalized framework to understand and reason in social networks. Previously, researchers have attempted to use inference-specific type of relationships. In this paper, we propose a framework to represent and reason with general case of social relationship networ...

There is a growing number of courses delivered using e-learning environments and their online discussions play an important role in collaborative learning of students. Even in courses with a few number of students, there could be thousands of messages generated in a few months within these forums. Manually evaluating the participation of students in such case is a significant challenge, conside...

A serious problem in eParticipation projects is citizen engagement – citizens do not necessarily become more willing to participate simply because net-services are provided for them. Most forms of eParticipation in democratic contexts are, however, dependent on citizen engagement, interaction and social networking because democratic systems favour the interests of larger groups of citizens – th...

Social knowledge and data sharing on the Web takes many forms. So too do the ways people share ideas and opinions. In this paper we examine one such emerging form: the amateur critic. In particular, we examine genius.com, a website which allows its users to annotate and explain the meaning of segments of lyrics in music and other written works. We describe a novel dataset of approximately 700,0...

Overlapping community detection is a popular topic in complex networks. As compared to disjoint community structure, overlapping community structure is more suitable to describe networks at a macroscopic level. Overlaps shared by communities play an important role in combining different communities. In this paper, two methods are proposed to detect overlapping community structure. One is called...

This paper tackles with the background theory and the typology of incentives that characterize behavior in online social interactions. Online social interactions are the major element of activity in online communities. Social network theory and in particular the strength of weak ties hypothesis can provide an analytical framework for studying them. We contribute by introducing a typology of soc...

A precise definition of what constitutes a community in networks has remained elusive. Consequently, network scientists have compared community detection algorithms on benchmark networks with a particular form of community structure and classified them based on the mathematical techniques they employ. However, this comparison can be misleading because apparent similarities in their mathematical...

This article details a set of procedures for the analysis and interpretation of the content and structure of online networks and communities. These novel methods allow for the analysis of online chat, including parsing the data http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol8/issue4/rosen.html (1 of 19) [1/11/2005 9:13:46 AM] Procedures for Analyses of Online Communities into separate and interrelated files to ...