Social Capital Simulation (Online)

The past couple days I have been working on an online social capital simulation that was created primarily with Javascript. Currently, it calculates social capital in the same manner as the excel version, however, it is more powerful as it allows you to set how many nodes you would like in the network, it dynamically creates a visual graph of the network, and it is accessible online.
I used Walter Zorn's High Performance JavaScript Vector Graphics Library to draw the network (i.e., nodes, lines, and text). This is an impressive library, which makes drawing with Javascript more pleasant than I originally expected. Also, to facilitate this project, I extended Zorn's library by adding getColor, getOpacity, and setOpacity methods. Furthermore, Michael Deardeuff and other Data Mining Lab members used their keen pattern finding skills to develop the mathematical equation for node placement in the graph.

Let me know how it works for you. I want to make this available so that it is easy to for people to get a feel for how we calculate social capital, which will allow us to refine our method.

Burt's Views

I have been reading Ronald Burt's book called "Brokerage and Closure" to gain a better understanding of his view of social capital. Here are a few points that I have found interesting as I have read:

The value of a relationship is not defined inside the relationship; it is defined by the social context around the relationship" (Brokerage and Closure, pg. 11).

The "working definition" of a structural hole is the relationship between two people is a hole-spanning bridge when there is no effective indirect connection between the people. However, Burt does not wish to imply that the concept of a structural hole has an absolute meaning. He explains that structural holes could come and go by simply changing the population size of the network being analyzed. He argues that the same definitional issue exists for the absolute meaning of a relationship, a fundamental element of network theory (Brokerage and Closure, pg. 24).So, as an example, the structural hole in the network above is the relationship marked blue, while the value of that relationship is defined by the social context, or the other nodes in the network (i.e., A, B, G, E, F, H, and I).

Gmail Temporarily Down

Dependence on Google is not always good. Here is the error message:


Update: Gmail is back up! The duration of the "Temporary Error" lasted about half an hour.

Book List: Social Capital

In my quest to better understand how sociologists view social capital, I visited the library and checked out the following books:

• Structural holes : the social structure of competition Burt, Ronald S.
• Brokerage and closure : an introduction to social capital Burt, Ronald S.
• Applied network analysis : a methodological introduction Burt, Ronald S.
• Social capital : theory and research Lin, Nan
• New social ties : contemporary connections in a fragmented society Chambers, Deborah.
• Complex social networks Vega-Redondo, Fernando.
• Effective small group and team communication Hoover, Judith D. (Judith Davis)
• The role of social capital in development : an empirical assessment Grootaert, Christiaan
  
• Social capital : a theory of social structure and action Lin, Nan
  
• The well-connected community : a networking approach to community development Gilchrist, Alison.
• The Analysis of social interactions : methods, issues, and illustrations Cairns, Robert B.
  

Of course, I won't have time to read all of these books from cover to cover. However, I do plan on reading enough to understand how they define, calculate, and show the presence of social capital.

Social Capital Simulation

Our recent work has explored the concept of social capital, which I have discussed previously. Our social capital metrics, namely bonding and bridging (popularized by Robert Putnam), utilize the hybrid network methodology that we have developed for online communities.

To understand our metrics, I have created a basic social capital simulation (an excel spreadsheet) having five nodes. The simulation allows for you to change the connection strengths in both the implicit affinity network (IAN) and the explicit social network (ESN). Changing these values will give you an idea of how social capital fluctuates as the social network changes.

The figure above shows the initial configuration of the simulation. The dashed blue lines represent the IAN and the solid pink lines represent the ESN. The thicker the lines the stronger the connection. The weights for the IAN were randomly assigned, while the ESN weights were all set to one, thus creating a clique.

Initially, the bonding and bridging social capital are both 1, since everyone in the network is connected. To see how the social capital fluctuates, change the blue and/or pink values, again representing the IAN and the ESN weights respectively, in the spreadsheet.

Social Graph API by Google

Google's Social Graph API allows developers to utilize the public connections among people on the web. The idea is simple, yet it could make it easier for people to connect across sites. Of course, the data all comes through Google, which yet increases our dependence on them. No doubt, other search engines could easily create the same API.

Since Google already saves a copy of all of the web pages that it spiders for search, the task of extracting the annotated links is somewhat trivial. Currently, this will only work as web developers annotate user links with XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and Friend of a Friend (FOAF). It is a great idea, but may take some time before web developers start annotating.
Furthermore, the easy access to people's connections is a nice data source for some new applications and experiments.

Measuring Social Capital (Weekly Update)

During this week, I have been reading and thinking more about how to measure social capital. In the literature, there is no agreed upon definition of social capital nor is there any agreed upon method for measuring it. Therefore, proximal indicators are used to measure some believably related contributor to social capital.

For instance, Putnam has used the density of voluntary organizations (VOs) in a community to measure social capital. So, in this case, the density of VOs is a proximal indicator for social capital.

Nan Lin uses the number of connections an individual has weighted by the importance of the person.

Social Capital Survey Reading:
Social Capital: One or Many? by Martin Paldam (Economist)
Social Capital Survey by Tristan Claridge (in particular, see measurement)

Topic Tool

Today, I put together a web page topic tool by using the web service that Nathan Davis made available. The tool takes in one or more web pages (i.e., a list of URLs) and then extracts the topics given the text on the web pages. The topics, or more accurately, the most likely topic components are extracted using an algorithm called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

One potential use is for quickly generating blogger profiles to be used for implicit affinity networks. You can try it out at:

http://dml.cs.byu.edu/matthewsmith/tools/topictool/

Nathan uses his web service to make the query expansion service for Google searches called GooEgg.

Social Capital Measurement

There are countless methods for measuring social capital. Below is a list of papers, studies, and resources that discuss some of these techniques:

• Paldam, M. (2000), Social Capital: One Or Many? Definition And Measurement, in Journal of Economic Surveys, 14, 5, pp. 629-653.
• Stone, W. (2001), Measuring Social Capital, Melbourne, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Research Paper No. 24/2001.
• Li, Y, Pickles, A., Savage, M. (2003), Conceptualizing and measuring social capital: a new approach, Paper for BHPS 2003, Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester.
• Grootaert, C., van Bastelaer, T. (2002), Understanding and Measuring Social Capital: A Multi-Disciplinary Tool for Practitioners, Washington DC, The World Bank.
• Bullen, P., Onyx, J. (2000), Measuring Social Capital in Five Communities in NSW, Onyx and Bullen - Journal of Applied Behavior Science, Vol 36 No 1 March 2000 pp23-42. (Summary Report)
• More Readings on Measuring Social Capital

More

• Measuring social capital within health surveys: key issues
• Social capital and value creation: The role of intrafirm networks
• Observations on social capital
• Measurement of Social Capital (added on 1/29/08)
  

It is clear that there are many ways to measure social capital. The techniques vary from discipline to discipline and researcher to researcher, whether it be Putnam or Burt, sociology or political science, the approaches tend to be different. Is there a chance for standardizing the definition? (Update: see more recent post for more on this)

DML Research Collaboration

In effort to collaborate and refine our research at a faster pace, it might be fun to (1) blog about our research ideas each week and then (2) visit each lab member's blog to comment on what they have written to encourage good ideas and weed out the bad.

What do you think?

Weekly Update

The tasks that I was involved (and some thoughts) during this week include the following:

Outlined a preliminary schedule and brainstormed for the "Making a Blog Big" project with Nathan Purser

Read more about Structural Holes and Network Closure, including:

• Ronald Burt's Structural Holes versus Network Closure (PDF). Notes:
  
• Some more quickly become prominent; some enjoy higher incomes; some lead more important projects; the interests of some are better served than interests of others. Better connected people enjoy higher returns. (These are some things that we could use to validate our social capital metrics.)
  
• The Social Capital Metaphor is "people that are better connected do better", whereas the Human Capital Metaphor is "people who do better are more able individuals; they are more intelligent; more attractive; more articulate; more skilled."
• A generic research finding in sociology and social psychology is that information circulates more within than between groups
• Social capital can be argued to exist in structural holes (bridging) and network closures (bonding). However, the studies he performs and shows indicate that structural holes are the source of social capital.
• Networks of densely interconnected contacts are systematically associated with substandard performance (bonding); networks that span structural holes are associated with creativity and innovation, positive evaluations, early promotions, high compensation and profits (bridging).
• There remains an important role for closure. It can be critical to realizing the value buried in structural holes.
• The mechanisms remain distinct. Closure describes how dense or hierarchical networks lower the risk associated with transaction and trust, which can be associated with performance. The hole argument describes how structural holes are opportunities to add value with brokerage across the holes, which is associated with performance.
  
• Bruce Hoppe's blog post, Reputation and Trust (aka "Network Closure")
• Uses a good personal example of Network Closure
  
• I commented, "Virtual communities, no doubt, have an impact on real communities. However, I would argue that Putnam's work stands as does Burt's. The main issue seems to be that social capital is challenging to define precisely. Are there any agreed upon mathematical definitions of social capital? (It seems that there is still too much ambiguity.)"

Reading that I like to get to:

• Nan Lin's Building a Network Theory of Social Capital (PDF)
• Unpacking Burt's Redundancy Measure
• Measurement of Social Capital
  

Found some other interesting resources, along the way:

• Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy (ISNAE)
  
• Social Network Researchers By Author (at ISNAE)
  
• Introduction to Networks Mathematics by Bruce Hoppe
  
• Bruce Hoppe's blog
• Social Network Researchers:
• Wayne Baker
• Steve Borgatti
• Ron Burt
• Rob Cross
• Jonathon Cummings
• Jon Kleinberg
• David Krackhardt
• Valdis Krebs

Top Social Networking and Blogging Sites

Nielsen Online released the top Social Networking sites (ranked by unique audience), as follows:MySpace still leads the pack this year, yet Facebook grew at an astounding rate of 72%, proving to be the "hottest" of the Top 5.

Top Blogging sites were as follows, as of December 2007:Google backed Blogger continues to have and add the most unique audience.

For more information, try this or either of these related reports.

Finding an Important Problem

There seems to be infinitely many problems in the world. The trick is finding one that is sufficiently interesting to focus a dissertation on. The hope is that it has the following qualities:

• Should impact a diverse audience (more than just the geeks in the computer lab)
• Should be scientific yet have a host of business applications
  
• Would be nice if it were related, at least in part, to my previous work
• To be continued...

Generating Research

As I am amidst the decision of what to focus my PhD work on, my thoughts take me back to a talk given nearly a year ago by Dan Olsen. In this presentation he mentioned the following steps for generating research:

1. Find an important problem
2. Generate lots of ideas
3. Filter them down
4. Make them real

This week I'd like to work on the step 1 and find an important problem in the realm of data mining and likely social networks. I'll let you know what I come up with.

Let It Live

This is a little presentation that I gave to the DML today.