And it demonstrates that, though the mountains are high and the oceans are wide, it really is a small world.This is an interesting data science conjecture, inspired by the well known six degrees of separation problem, stating that there is a link involving no more than 6 connections between any two people on Earth, say between you and anyone living (say) in North Korea. Social-network analysis is the tool that taps the data to fight crime or suggest movies. Retroactively, we can also see who may have been connected in the past, but is no longer connected now." "Using predictive analysis, we can see who may not be connected now but may be connected in the future. "Say you've mapped the criminal activity of a certain network, outlining events, people, places and objects," says Zaïane. Everyone you never knew you'd knowįor Zaïane, the most exciting implications behind social-network analysis lie in our new-found ability to see the future, kind of. Netflix users can receive eerily accurate recommendations based on what they and others in their network are watching. Linguists can uncover new connections among languages. Public health practitioners can track health outcomes. Businesses can discern customer behaviour. When we understand how actors interact and, more specifically, how actors with similar features interact, we can begin to understand network characteristics, ranging from power relations to other connections we didn't even realize were there.īiologists can use social-network analysis to understand the ways in which proteins interact. In the digital age, Zaiane says you can see how data management and mining affects everything from your consumption of entertainment to your health-screening behaviours. An expert in data management and information mining, he's familiar with the power of social networks. "If we have data that show the relationships between entities, we can use social-network analysis to learn a great deal about it," says Osmar Zaïane, computing science professor and scientific director of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. "The more people we have on this planet, the more connections we have, and the closer we become to one another," Schaeffer says.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, support and facilitate social networks that may or may not otherwise exist.Ī paper published by Schaeffer and colleagues in 2011 showed there were just 3.44 degrees of separation between users on Twitter - nearly halving Karinthy's original hypothesis. "People connect for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of places where in-person connections may never have been made." The sweet vegetable bahji recipe you snared on Instagram from that chef in Buenos Aires is testament to this.īut there is an important distinction to make between social media and social networks: they are not the same. "Digital social networks transcend all sorts of boundaries, such as geography and traditional social circles," Schaeffer says. It's no surprise that our digital social networks are changing our graphs dramatically. "When considering degrees of separation, we're talking about the shortest distance between point A and point B on that graph." "Relationships between people can be represented in very large, connected graphs," says Jonathan Schaeffer, dean of the Faculty of Science. The small-world paradox is supported by research that shows, even as our population grows, the degrees of separation among us are fewer. In the late 1920s, Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy described the small-world paradox, in which he proposed there are up to six degrees separating any two people on the planet. Finally, there are degrees of connectivity, or the number of connections an actor has. A connection can also be a coincidence, such as being stuck in the same beer queue at a game.
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These include family, friendships and professional relationships. Next, there are connections among the actors. In a social network, we usually think of nodes as individual people, but they can also be places or events, such as the Eiffel Tower or a basketball game. Some are directly connected, like London and Paris, others have a few stops between, like Aberdeen and Bordeaux. You can imagine a network like an airline routes map, with cities representing nodes.
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And these networks have a lot in common.Įach one involves a series of actors, also called nodes. From the office, to volunteering with your kid's basketball team, to swapping pictures with favourite vegan chefs on Instagram, social networks are everywhere - online and in real life.
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