Articles

Spatiotemporal correlations of handset-based service usages

We study spatiotemporal correlations and temporal diversities of handset-based service usages by analyzing a dataset that includes detailed information about locations and service usages of 124 users over 16 m...

Authors: Hang-Hyun Jo, Márton Karsai, Juuso Karikoski and Kimmo Kaski

Beating the news using social media: the case study of American Idol

We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined...

Authors: Fabio Ciulla, Delia Mocanu, Andrea Baronchelli, Bruno Gonçalves, Nicola Perra and Alessandro Vespignani

Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster

Each year, crowd disasters happen in different areas of the world. How and why do such disasters happen? Are the fatalities caused by relentless behavior of people or a psychological state of panic that makes ...

Authors: Dirk Helbing and Pratik Mukerji

Partisan asymmetries in online political activity

We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partis...

Authors: Michael D Conover, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer

Social dynamics of Digg

Online social media provide multiple ways to find interesting content. One important method is highlighting content recommended by user’s friends. We examine this process on one such site, the news aggregator ...

Authors: Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman

Effects of time window size and placement on the structure of an aggregated communication network

Complex networks are often constructed by aggregating empirical data over time, such that a link represents the existence of interactions between the endpoint nodes and the link weight represents the intensity...

Authors: Gautier Krings, Márton Karsai, Sebastian Bernhardsson, Vincent D Blondel and Jari Saramäki

Positive words carry less information than negative words

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length [1] and the average information content [2], but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of aff...

Authors: David Garcia, Antonios Garas and Frank Schweitzer

Long trend dynamics in social media

A main characteristic of social media is that its diverse content, copiously generated by both standard outlets and general users, constantly competes for the scarce attention of large audiences. Out of this f...

Authors: Chunyan Wang and Bernardo A Huberman

Editorial

Authors: F Schweitzer and A Vespignani