Social Network Analysis
Hypermedia Laboratory is developing and applying the methods of social network analysis and social media analytics to provide insights for investigators of online communities, such as web discussion sites, newsgroups, virtual organizations, social media services and websites.
Projects in the field:
Studying Social Networks
Duration: 2009 -
Project type: National
More information: Senior Officer for Development, Project Manager Kirsi Silius
Description:
Social network analysis (SNA) has become a popular method for researching activity between people in online communities, such as web discussion sites, newsgroups, virtual organizations, social net services and websites. SNA methods can be used when researching large open socioecosystems, interactive network sites and virtual worlds. With SNA, person-to-person relationships can be researched very accurately. Different patterns can be found within these networks.
Results with greater diversity are generated when both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used. Researching a specific network with SNA methods allows discovery of connections between people. Qualitative methods help the researcher to provide reasons for the existing connections. Qualitative research methods can also be used to support SNA; for example, when the motives to do things in user networks are researched or past information is researched. With SNA, interesting sources of information can be found within the community. Quantitative methods are then used when researching the source of information by interviewing users or by analyzing qualitative data that describe the personal characteristics of the sources of information.
Sindi
Duration: 2010 - 2012
Project type: National (internation co-operation)
Partners: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (coordinator), Innovation Ecosystems Network
Web pages: (under development)
Further information: Researcher Jukka Huhtamäki
Sindi stands for Social Media Supported Indicators for Monitoring and Evaluating User Driven Innovation. The Sindi project supports the development of data-driven indicators for measuring the process and impact of user driven ICT-supported service innovation. Meaning-making is facilitated by applying the methods of data-driven information visualisation in indicator dissemination. The three areas of indicator-development in Sindi are education, well-being and innovation ecosystems. The project concentrates on exploiting the increasingly diverse digital socially-constructed databases as a source of data and uses social media and mashup-like tools for dissemination of the findings.
Prof. Minna Isomursu of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland co-ordinates Sindi. Research on innovation ecosystems is conducted in co-operation with the Innovation Ecosystems Network lead by Martha G. Russell, Media X at Stanford.
Openrisk
Length: 2010 - 2011
Project type: National
Partners: VTT - Technical Research Centre of Finland (coordinator), University of Oulu - The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Laboratory
Web pages: http://www.vtt.fi/sites/openrisk/, http://openrisk.wordpress.com/
Further information: Researcher Anne-Maritta Tervakari
Description:
A main aim of the Openrisk project is to develop a better understanding of utilization of social media services in Finnish safety and health-promoting organisations. The professional use of social media is examined within four case studies:
- Case 1: Development of communality of a work well-being forum (Forum for well-being at work, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health)
- Case 2: Publishing accident statistics and Occupational Accident Research System Reports (TOT-Reports) available for online commenting (VTT - Technical Research Centre of Finland, HaiPro)
- Case 3: Handling workplace bullying with specialists using social media tools (TJS Opintokeskus)
- Case 4: Social media in security communications (Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency - Tukes )
Case organizations develop their own procedures for exploiting social media services and produce empirical information regarding social service use and changes in community activity. During the project, Hypermedia Laboratory is developing methods and tools for analysis and visualisations of complex network information. With the developed methods and tools, the rich data collected from complex social networks can be processed and visualised and exported to different kinds of software used by researchers (e.g. Gephi, NodeXL, Pajek, Vizster, MATLAB, SPSS) for further analysis.
The developed tools and methods can be used to observe and to verify changes in social networks following social and functional interventions; e.g., in visualising network evolution or in clustering network actors in a certain way. The tools and methods can also be utilised for tracking of social service usage.
The results of social network analysis and the visualisations based on this analysis will establish a more profound understanding of the usefulness of social services as a tool of information sharing and will point out how features and mechanisms of social service affect the activities of the social network in the context of Finnish safety and health promoting organisations.
The Openrisk project is coordinated by VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland), Risk management. Further information: Jouko Heikkilä, project manager, tel. +348-20 722 3268, http://www.vtt.fi