Ncasd

The NCASD Lab was well-represented at this year’s American Sociological Association meeting. Emma Spiro presented work on self-disclosure norms on Facebook. A key component of self-presentation is the decision to reveal or conceal information about one’s person or circumstances. The online environment provides a unique opportunity for comparative study of such privacy-related behavior, both because of its relative newness and because of the opportunities it affords for systematic behavioral measurement on a global scale.

Lab members Carter Butts, Zack Almquist, Emma Spiro, Sean Fitzhugh, Adam Boessen, Ragupathyraj Valluvan, and Nicole Beckage presented research at the INSNA Sunbelt XXXII Conference in Redondo Beach, California. Lab alumni Ryan Acton, Chris Marcum, Lorien Jasny and Miruna Petrescu-Prahova also presented at the conference. Emma Spiro presented work from the HEROIC Project entitled “A Microstructure Topology for Hyperedge Communication Events.” She also co-presented with collaborator Britta Johnson from UCCS work titled “Disruptive Diffusion: Adoption of Microblog Technologies Among Urban Organizations.

Members of the Networks, Computation, and Social Dynamics (NCASD) Lab presented on various Lab research initiatives at the recent American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Emma Spiro presented a talk titled, “Maintaining Ties from Coast to Coast: Selective Mixing Between Universities on Facebook” to the Methodology Section regarding the patterns in public college attendees and private college attendees’ social ties. The NCASD Lab was also pleased to have Lab Member Spiro inducted as the student representative to the ASA Mathematical Sociology Section Council at the conference, where she will serve alongside UCI Sociology Professor Kathryn Faust, who is this year’s Council Chair.

The NCASD Lab is proud to announce the kick-off of Project HEROIC, a collaborative, NSF funded effort by the Lab in conjunction with researchers at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS). Through a combination of data collection and modeling of conversation dynamics, the project team aims to understand the relationship between hazard events, informal communication and emergency response. Project HEROIC’s initial phase seeks to understand the role and effectiveness of informal communications on popular microblogging sites, like Twitter, as information sources during disaster events of all types.

All NCASD Lab members presented research to the Office of Naval Research MURI funding oversight committee at the annual Scalable Methods for the Analysis of Network-Based Data All Hands Meeting. Highlights included Professor Butts’s talk on the importance of seasonality and node sets in modeling networks, Zack Almquist’s demonstration of the UScensus2000-suite of R packages, Emma Spiro’s discussion of the UCI network data package repository, and a poster session featuring work presented by lab members Zack Almquist, Sean Fitzhugh, Lorien Jasny, Chris Marcum, Nicole Pierksy, and Emma Spiro.

Several lab members presented research at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Several lab members presented research at this year’s annual Sunbelt Conference.