Level of Social Networks? How to define a social networks in digital media?
Social networks in social science are characterised by the social interaction between two actors/nodes (Wasserman & Faust, Jansen). For the use of social network methods in information retrieval it is most interesting, where social networks can be found in digital media? How can we identify and extract social networks in digital media? What are the criteria to identify a social network? How to determine the tie strength between actors?
Social network sites are obvious choices, where the connection between actors are sometimes explicitly made public. There are lots of studies of these social networks. Email communication and Instant Messengers are another type, where social networks can be extracted. Networks within scientific publications are also cited often for social network analysis, because most of the publication data is available electronically by now. In this case either the co-author network or citation networks are analysed. I'll try to categorise in this post.
