Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups

By Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Samuel Arbesman, Albert-László Barabási, Nicholas A. Christakis. PLoS ONE, 2010

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct a social network of individuals whose most frequent geographical locations are also known. We also classify the individuals into groups according to a community detection algorithm. We study the variation of geographical span for social groups of varying sizes, and explore the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of their members. We find that small social groups are geographically very tight, but become much more clumped when the group size exceeds about 30 members. Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints.

Subfields: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b99f36f7a2bd55ad202e29e1ee115d4567c29a95

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution (2014, background): “4 million users, the probability was found to decrease as d [48].”
Uncovering space-independent communities in spatial networks (2010, methodology): “In practice, the current state-of-the-art for finding modules in spatial networks (44, 45) is to optimize the standard Newman– Girvan modularity, which, as we argue below, overlooks the spatial nature of the system.”
Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior (2011, methodology): “While we have done work on the former [5, 7-13], here we will focus primarily on the latter, discussing analyses of the flow of behaviors, affective states, or germs.”
The Length of Bridge Ties: Structural and Geographic Properties of Online Social Interactions (2012, background): “Yet, space is constraining network structure as well: in fact, social communities tend to be limited in their geographic span, denoting a potential relationship between structural position and geographic distance (Onnela et al. 2011).”
Do all birds tweet the same?: characterizing twitter around the world (2011, background): “[11], present a study on a large-scale network of mobile calls and text messages.”
Revealing daily travel patterns and city structure with taxi trip data (2013, methodology): “Some studies also use city relationship data (Kang et al. 2013, Ratti et al. 2010) or friendship data (Liben-Nowell et al. 2005, Onnela et al. 2011) to explore spatial interaction issues.”
New Tools for New Research in Psychiatry: A Scalable and Customizable Platform to Empower Data Driven Smartphone Research (2016, neutral): “Mobile phone data, in the format of anonymized call detail records obtained directly from phone operators, have now been used for about a decade to study social and communication networks, communication dynamics, spatial mobility, and more [24-29].”