Articles

The role of hidden influentials in the diffusion of online information cascades

In a diversified context with multiple social networking sites, heterogeneous activity patterns and different user-user relations, the concept of ‘information cascade’ is all but univocal. Despite the fact tha...

Authors: Raquel A Baños, Javier Borge-Holthoefer and Yamir Moreno

Probing crowd density through smartphones in city-scale mass gatherings

City-scale mass gatherings attract hundreds of thousands of pedestrians. These pedestrians need to be monitored constantly to detect critical crowd situations at an early stage and to mitigate the risk that si...

Authors: Martin Wirz, Tobias Franke, Daniel Roggen, Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Paul Lukowicz and Gerhard Tröster

The dynamics of health behavior sentiments on a large online social network

Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcom...

Authors: Marcel Salathé, Duy Q Vu, Shashank Khandelwal and David R Hunter

Word usage mirrors community structure in the online social network Twitter

Language has functions that transcend the transmission of information and varies with social context. To find out how language and social network structure interlink, we studied communication on Twitter, a bro...

Authors: John Bryden, Sebastian Funk and Vincent AA Jansen

Lognormal distributions of user post lengths in Internet discussions - a consequence of the Weber-Fechner law?

The paper presents an analysis of the length of comments posted in Internet discussion fora, based on a collection of large datasets from several sources. We found that despite differences in the forum languag...

Authors: Pawel Sobkowicz, Mike Thelwall, Kevan Buckley, Georgios Paltoglou and Antoni Sobkowicz

Realities of data sharing using the genome wars as case study - an historical perspective and commentary

The importance of data sharing has become a mantra within the science research community. However, sharing has not been as easy (or as readily adopted) as advocates have suggested. Questions of privacy, indivi...

Authors: Barbara R Jasny

Link creation and information spreading over social and communication ties in an interest-based online social network

Complex dynamics of social media emerge from the interaction between the patterns of social connectivity of users and the information exchanged along such social ties. Unveiling the underlying mechanisms that ...

Authors: Luca Maria Aiello, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Rossano Schifanella and Giancarlo Ruffo

Genetic flow directionality and geographical segregation in a Cymodocea nodosa genetic diversity network

We analyse a large data set of genetic markers obtained from populations of Cymodocea nodosa, a marine plant occurring from the East Mediterranean to the Iberian-African coasts in the Atlantic Ocean. We fully dev...

Authors: A Paolo Masucci, Sophie Arnaud-Haond, Víctor M Eguíluz, Emilio Hernández-García and Ester A Serrão

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

A large-scale community structure analysis in Facebook

Understanding social dynamics that govern human phenomena, such as communications and social relationships is a major problem in current computational social sciences. In particular, given the unprecedented succe...

Authors: Emilio Ferrara

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