Emma Spiro will head to Hamburg, Germany next week to present preliminary findings from HEROIC projects at Sunbelt XXXIII. The annual conference is sponsored by the International Network for Social Network Analysis.
Spiro will present an exploration of tie dynamics in online social networks. Many social systems now facilitate rapid re-organization (creation and dissolution) of social ties over short time scales on the order of days. Spiro et al. examine tie decay following instances of mass convergence of attention (i.e. degree spikes) on particular users of a popular microblogging service. They do so for randomly sampled users as well as a population of targeted emergency management organizations.