January 31, 2008

Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) Theory Seminar: Michael Macy, Cornell University
Annenberg Room 240, 2:10 p.m.

Join students and faculty for a presentation by Cornell sociology professor Michael Macy. His topic: "The Social Dynamics of Online Networks". From Prof. Macy: "Social scientists routinely collect stores of individual-level data, using surveys and records kept by governments and employers. These data are then aggregated across groups of varying size, from households to nation states. In comparison, we have very limited data about the interactions between people. Social interactions are fleeting and mostly private, making them hard to capture and arduous to hand-code and record. These problems are compounded by the need for repeated observations and by the exponential increase in the number of relations as group size increases. As a result, other than financial transactions, social dynamics are not systematically documented at the relational level, except in observational and ethnographic studies of small groups.”


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