Just a little more than 18 months after submission [sic!] our book chapter on mining and visualizing content from social networks has now been published by Springer. The book project Computational Social Networks obviously was a big success as they published three books out of the submissions.

Book 1 is on social networking tools, perspectives and applications, book 2 is on security and privacy in social networks and finally book 3 is on mining and visualizations of social networks.

Our chapter is entitled Mining and Visualizing Research Networks Using the Artefact-Actor-Network Approach and took a look at several incipient social networks in Twitter, SlideShare and Delicious.

Here’s the abstract of the chapter:

Virtual communities are increasingly relying on technologies and tools of the so-called Web 2.0. In the context of scientific events and topical Research Networks, researchers use Social Media as one main communication channel. This raises the question, how to monitor and analyze such Research Networks. In this chapter we argue that Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) serve well for modeling, storing and mining the social interactions around digital learning resources originating from various learning services. In order to deepen the model of AANs and its application to Research Networks, a relevant theoretical background as well as clues for a prototypical reference implementation are provided. This is followed by the analysis of six Research Networks and a detailed inspection of the results. Moreover, selected networks are visualized. Research Networks of the same type show similar descriptive measures while different types are not directly comparable to each other. Further, our analysis shows that narrowness of a Research Network’s subject area can be predicted using the connectedness of semantic similarity networks. Finally conclusions are drawn and implications for future research are discussed.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, A. Wilke, M. Moi, H. Drachsler, and P. B. Sloep. Mining and visualizing Research Networks using the Artefact-Actor-Network approach. In A. Abraham, editor, Computational Social Networks, pages 233–267. Springer London, 2012.