Course: The Power of Social Media

Perhaps the most obvious way to benefit from social media analysis is to use it to study the way that individuals and communities behave. It should also make us think …

In the following five Steps, we look at how researchers have used network analytics in their work, to build models of how communities behave, explore social theories such as Homophily, …

Watch this short video that introduces the idea of network analytics, and contains an activity to calculate the most powerful individual in a small social network using one of a …

Essential knowledge: The Local Clustering Co-efficient tells us how connected the network is around a particular node. The clustering co-efficient is a fraction, representing the number of connections that exist …

Essential knowledge: A network is a set of nodes and a set of edges between nodes, this means that it is possible to have a network that is made up …

Essential knowledge: The degree of a node is the number of connections that it has to other nodes in the network. In a social network if you have 100 friends …

Essential knowledge: A Scale Free Network is one in which the distribution of links to nodes follows a power law. The power law means that the vast majority of nodes …

Essential knowledge: Networks are said to have a Small World property if any two nodes are connected by a short number of hops, typically less than six. This means it …

Thinking about social media interactions as a network helps us to compare and analyse them. It can tell us about the role that individuals take within the network, explain how …

Networks are all around us, but have you considered what makes a network, and what shapes and properties they may have? Understanding networks in an abstract way (as nodes and …

In this short video, you meet leading Web scientists Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt who discuss the relevance of the study of networks to Web Science. …

At their heart social media sites and applications are about networks. In this step we will look at the arguments for an increased role of networks in our understanding of …

This course is itself a social network. What do you think the benefits of using social media tools to support your learning on this course might be? Try putting your …

As social media in various forms have been with us for 10 years or so now, we can start to see interesting patterns not just in what tools are currently …