SOC 4340 - [Online Social and Information Networks]

(SBA-AS)

Fall. Next offered 2017-2018. 4 credits.

M. Macy.

This research seminar will introduce students to the new opportunities for research using data from on-line interactions and on-line experiments. The readings consist of journal articles on a range of topics in the exciting new field of computational social science, including diffusion, homophily, inequality, crowd-sourcing, social influence, trust, reputation, and task-group performance. Students will take turns presenting a reading assignment to the seminar. In addition, students will design, develop, and (hopefully) launch a research project using online data, whether observational (e.g. from Twitter or last.fm) or from an on-line experiment. Instead of creating a new project of their own, students may also elect to join one of the existing research teams in the Social Dynamics Lab. The final paper for the seminar will be a research report on the progress of this research that surveys the relevant literature, frames and motivates the question that the research seeks to answer, describes the research design, data, and methods, and where possible, includes any initial findings.