Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups
Name
Onnela-2011-Geographic Constrain.pdf
Size
779.06 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
99fc32605c21f13b16be8126e70f974a
Author(s)
Onnela, Jukka-Pekka
Arbesman, Samuel
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo
Christakis, Nicholas A.
Date Issued
April 2011
Journal
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Onnela J-P, Arbesman S., Gonzalez M.C., Barabasi A-L, Christakis N.A. (2011) "Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups." PLoS ONE 6(4): e16939.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct a social network of individuals whose most frequent geographical locations are also known. We also classify the individuals into groups according to a community detection algorithm. We study the variation of geographical span for social groups of varying sizes, and explore the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of their members. We find that small social groups are geographically very tight, but become much more clumped when the group size exceeds about 30 members. Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016939
