DocumentCode :
1584199
Title :
Discovery of Community Structures in a Heterogeneous Professional Online Network
Author :
Suthers, Dan ; Fusco, Judi ; Schank, Patricia ; Chu, Kar-Hai ; Schlager, Mark
fYear :
2013
Firstpage :
3262
Lastpage :
3271
Abstract :
Socio-technical networks that are heterogeneous in composition of actors and the media through which they interact are becoming common, but opportunities to study the emergent community structure of such networks are rare. We report a study of an international online network of educators involved in many forms of professional development and peer support, including sponsored and volunteer-driven activities taking place in both synchronous and asynchronous media, with participants from diverse career stages and occupations in education. A modularity-partitioning algorithm was applied to a directed, weighted, multimodal graph that represents associations between actors and the artifacts (chats, discussions and files) through which they interact. This analysis simultaneously detects cohesive subgroups of actors and artifacts, providing rich information about how communities are technologically embedded. Researchers deeply familiar with the network validated the interpretability of the partitions as corresponding to known activities, while also identifying new findings. The paper describes this interpretative validation, summarizes findings concerning the distribution and nature of communities and groups found within the larger heterogeneous network, and discusses open research questions and implications for practitioners.
Keywords :
Algorithm design and analysis; Communities; Educational institutions; Media; Organizations; Partitioning algorithms; community detection; online community; professional community; social network; virtual organizations;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
System Sciences (HICSS), 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Wailea, HI, USA
ISSN :
1530-1605
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-5933-7
Electronic_ISBN :
1530-1605
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/HICSS.2013.179
Filename :
6480237
Link To Document :
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