Very intriguing (re: applying time/space to SNA). So much can be misinterpreted by a snapshot of relations that may be based on transitory ties within the enterprise (projects, campaigns, etc). There is a "human geography" aspect to how networks emerge, form, and evolve over time that sometimes I think we miss.
Mapping Our Friendships Over Time and Space: The Future of Social Network Analysis
What new things could we discover if social network analysis took time and space into account, in addition to the raw connections between people? In most cases, social network analysis today is limited to discovering friend connections, community leaders and outlines, influential people and personal friend recommendations - in a static or snap-shot kind of way. If new factors could be taken into consideration, specifically changes over time and space, then social network analysis could discover things like emergence or decay of leadership, changes in trust over time, migration and mobility within particular communities online. That's very valuable information that the social web has barely begun to tackle capturing.
That's the topic of discussion in a new paper by Shashi Shekhar and research assistant Dev Oliver, spatial data scientists at the University of Minnesota, titled Computational Modeling of Spatio-temporal Social Networks: A Time-Aggregated Graph Approach (PDF). The paper was highlighted on the blog GIS and Science today.
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