Date: 25/02/2014
Time: 12:15-13:30
Location: Room T18-26
Speaker: Vincent Traag
Abstract:
Although many networks are available online from services such as Facebook andTwitter, social networks of national elites are much more elusive. We are interested in reconstructing elite networks based on co-occurrence of elites in newspaper articles, with the aim of trying to understand elite dynamics. Furthermore, we expect these elite dynamics to reflect societal developments. In this case, we reconstruct an elite network of Indonesia, with the ultimate goal of trying to understand how it is affected by the Fall of Suharto in 1998.
In this presentation, we will first describe the general structure of such a media co-occurrence network. We show that this network has a strong core with peripheral clusters being connected to the core. Other familiar properties, such as clustering, hubs, a weak ties effect and a small shortest path length can also be found in this network. This suggests that the news is dominated by a few people who tend to co-occur frequently with each other. The people who appear only in the margins of the news, tend to co-occur with this strong core, in addition to the local clustering of people around events or topics.