Measuring the dynamic bi-directional influence between content and social networks

Abstract

The Social Semantic Web has begun to provide connections between users within social networks and the content they produce across the whole of the Social Web. Thus, the Social Semantic Web provides a basis to analyze both the communication behavior of users together with the content of their communication. However, there is little research combining the tools to study communication behaviour and communication content, namely, social network analysis and content analysis. Furthermore, there is even less work addressing the longitudinal characteristics of such a combination. This paper presents a general framework for measuring the dynamic bi-directional influence between communication content and social networks. We apply this framework in two use-cases: online forum discussions and conference publications. The results provide a new perspective over the dynamics involving both social networks and communication content. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.