[Italian version]
We are happy to announce that the SIGSNA team has just been awarded of some new research funds. The funds coming from the FIRB – future in research – funding action of the Italian Minister of Research and University are awarded only to young researcher under the age of 32 yo.
Our research project: “Information monitoring, propagation analysis and community detection in Social Network Sites ” brings the work we’ve done so far to a next level aiming at working within a multiple SNSs scenario.
The main objectives of this project are:
1) The development of monitoring tools and models, to filter relevant messages among millions of textual interactions and to identify distributed conversations made
of these messages.
2) The study of how information propagates in SNSs, following complementary approaches: the evaluation of mathematical propagation models on real data, the
identification of propagation patterns and the development of sociological models to explain these patterns.
3) The definition of new metrics to provide meaningful descriptions of large SNSs and their application to identify communities and other relevant structures hidden
inside the networks.
The project – as well as the SIGSNA prject – is based on a collaboration between the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Urbino and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna.
The length of the FIRB research funds (3 years) and the large amount of funds (approx. 760K USD) will allow us to move deeper into the direction of high performance computing techniques applied to social network data. This is a research direction that we barely started and that seems to be quite promising.
[eng version]
Siamo estremamente felici di comunicare che il gruppo di ricerca SIGSNA ha vinto un importante finanziamento FIRB (futuro in ricerca) riservato ai progetti di ricerca presentati da ricercatori non strutturati con meno di 32 anni. Il progetto che abbiamo presentato si configura come un evoluzione di molte delle linee di ricerca che abbiamo portato avanti fino a questo momento. Al tempo stesso la lunghezza e l’importo del finanziamento (3 anni e ca 560mila € in totale) ci permettono di progettare un nuovo e più avanzato livello.
La sfida è infatti quella di analizzare un contesto estremamente complesso senza ridurlo ad un unico ambiente digitale ma affrontando l’intero ecosistema digitale. Ovviamente in quest’ottica alcuni dei lavori che abbiamo sviluppato fin ad ora (come il ML-model) insieme all’utilizzo di tecnologie HPC ci saranno di grande aiuto.
Mese: ottobre 2011
PRIN: Online social relations and identity: Italian experience in Social Network Sites.
We are happy to announce that the SIGSNA team is now officially part of a larger research group, counting 5 Italian universities (University of Urbino, University of Bologna, Catholic University of Milano, University of Bergamo, Calabria University), that has recently been awarded of PRIN research funds for the project: Online social relations and identity: Italian experience in Social Network Sites.
PRIN (short for the Italian version of: Research project of national interest) funds are awarded to large research group working of high level projects. The Online Social Relations and Identity project aims at investigating how social relations are reshaped and constructed Online. The research will focus on Italian people and will use Social Network Sites (SNS) as selected online environment for observation. Research methodology will be based on an advanced interdisciplinary approach based both on quantitative computer-driven analysis and on qualitative sociological analysis. This is obviously where all the expertise we’ve collected within the SIGNSA group will be most valuable.
The main research questions of the project are:
– What kinds of communication practices support social relationships in SNSs?
– What is the role of media production, fruition and sharing in this context?
– What kinds of practices support the public self-narration of users’ identity in SNSS?
– How is the distinction between private and public space being reshaped in SNSs? How this distinction in strategically used by users?
– How emotional relations (such as friendships or family) are redefined in SNSs?
In addition to that, since the research will use a large amount of automatically extracted data form SNS, a methodological question will be risen:
– What is an effective way to combine computer-based analysis of large quantity of SNS data with in-depth sociological interviews?
While ad ad hoc web site of the project will be established soon, we’re keeping publishing any relevant update also here.