ALBERTO PEPE

The relationship between acquaintanceship and coauthorship in scientific collaboration networks

Author: Alberto Pepe

Title: The relationship between acquaintanceship and coauthorship in scientific collaboration networks

Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62: 2121–2132. doi: 10.1002/asi.21629

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between acquaintanceship and coauthorship patterns in a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, geographically distributed research center. Two social networks are constructed and compared: a network of coauthorship, representing how researchers write articles with one another, and a network of acquaintanceship, representing how those researchers know each other on a personal level, based on their responses to an online survey. Statistical analyses of the topology and community structure of these networks point to the importance of small-scale, local, personal networks predicated upon acquaintanceship for accomplishing collaborative work in scientific communities.

One, None, and One Hundred Thousand (Facebook) Profiles

Q: What is the difference between Luigi Pirandello and Mark Zuckerberg?

A: 99,999 identities. Give or take.

During an interview last year, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, stated that*:

You have one identity. […] The days of you having a different image for your co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. […] Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. 

Luigi Pirandello, an Italian novelist and playwright of last century, would have had a different opinion. His 1925 classic novel Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (“One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”) recounts the tragedy of Vitangelo Moscarda, a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent and unitary identity for himself upon realizing that he inhabits one hundred thousand identities: one identity for each one of his 100,000 acquaintances. In order to “see clearly and be truly himself”, Moscarda embarks on a series of carefully crafted social experiments with his own identity. 

What would Moscarda’s identity tragedy look like if he had a Facebook account?

This week I am presenting/performing an abridged version of a working paper I coauthored with Spencer Wolff and Karen Van Godtsenhoven titled One, None and One Hundred Thousand Profiles: Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks. In the article, we transplant Moscarda’s identity play from its offline setting (a small town in Northern Italy at the beginning of last century) to the contemporary arena of online social networks, imagining how Moscarda would go about defending the integrity of his selfhood in the face of the discountenancing influences of the online world. 

The preprint of the article is available on arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.3428)

The presentation/performance is part of a Symposium for the Dynamics of the Internet and Society hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford in September 2011. 

*quoted in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.

The use of microblogging for field-based scientific research

Authors: Alberto Pepe, Matthew S. Mayernik

Title: The use of microblogging for field-based scientific research

Venue: Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-45 2012)

Abstract: Documenting the context in which data are collected is an integral part of the scientific research lifecycle. In field-based research, contextual information provides a detailed description of scientific practices and thus enables data interpretation and reuse. For field data, losing contextual information often means losing the data altogether. Yet, documenting the context of distributed, collaborative, field-based research can be a significant challenge due to the unpredictable nature of real-world settings and to the high degree of variability in data collection methods and scientific practices of different researchers. In this article, we propose the use of microblogging as a mechanism to support collection, ingestion, and publication of contextual information about the variegated digital artifacts that are produced in field research. We perform interviews with scholars involved in field-based environmental and urban sensing research, to determine the extent of adoption of Twitter and similar microblogging platforms and their potential use for field-specific research applications. Based on the results of these interviews as well as participant observation of field activities, we present the design, development, and pilot evaluation of a microblogging application integrated with an existing data collection platform on a handheld device. We investigate whether microblogging accommodates the variable and unpredictable nature of highly mobile research and whether it represents a suitable mechanism to document the context of field research data early in the scientific information lifecycle.

Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena

Authors: Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, Alberto Pepe

Title: Modeling public mood and emotion: Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena

Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2011), 17-21 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: Microblogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, also known as tweets, to the public or a selected circle of contacts. A variegated mosaic of microblogging uses has emerged since the launch of Twitter in 2006: daily chatter, conversation, information sharing, and news commentary, among others. Regardless of their content and intended use, tweets often convey pertinent information about their author’s mood status. As such, tweets can be regarded as temporally-authentic microscopic instantiations of public mood state. In this article, we perform a sentiment analysis of all public tweets broadcasted by Twitter users between August 1 and December 20, 2008. For every day in the timeline, we extract six dimensions of mood (tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, confusion) using an extended version of the Profile of Mood States (POMS), a well-established psychometric instrument. We compare our results to fluctuations recorded by stock market and crude oil price indices and major events in media and popular culture, such as the U.S. Presidential Election of November 4, 2008 and Thanksgiving Day. We find that events in the social, political, cultural and economic sphere do have a significant, immediate and highly specific effect on the various dimensions of public mood. We speculate that large scale analyses of mood can provide a solid platform to model collective emotive trends in terms of their predictive value with regards to existing social as well as economic indicators.

ASIS&T award

I am very happy to report that I am the the recipient of the 2010 ASIS&T ProQuest Doctoral Dissertation Award, for my dissertation titled “Structure and Evolution of Scientific Collaboration Networks in a Modern Research Collaboratory”. ASIS&T is the American Society for Information Science & Technology. Here is the complete list of awards.

The award will be presented at the ASIST Annual Conference in Pittsburgh, on Tuesday October 26, 2010. I will be there to receive the award and present a short summary of my dissertation research.

Here is the blurb associated with the award:

“Structure and Evolution of Scientific Collaboration Networks in a Modern Research Collaboratory” by Alberto Pepe, was an exemplary, innovative, pioneering, and potentially highly influential dissertation in an increasingly important area of study in information science, that is, scientific collaboration throughout the world and across disciplines. Pepe investigated collaborative ecology of a multi-disciplinary and distributed science environment, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation focused on three aspects of network interactions: co-authorship of professional publications, scholarly communication via network mailing lists, and interpersonal acquaintanceship patterns. Pepe’s work explored social / scientific network analysis theories and concepts, and examined the topology, structure, and evolution of these networks in relation to the disciplinary and institutional arrangements of CENS. This research’s methodology and data analysis were well designed, logically organized, thoroughly explained, and comprehensively documented. Pepe’s dissertation provides insights into how scientists communicate with each other on a day-to-day basis and how they negotiate the distribution of tasks and evaluate the contributions of one another to the project as a whole. As scholarly publishing and science itself adapt to the Internet age, Pepe’s work will stand as a model for information scientists studying these important developments.

postdoc!

After an eventful summer spent traveling through Europe, Japan, and across America, I am very pleased to report that this week I join the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University for a postdoctoral research position. 

I will work primarily with Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, whose research ranges from the study of star formation to data visualization and scientific communication. My broader collaboration team will include August Muench, Rahul Dave, Alberto Accomazzi, and Michael Kurtz. I also plan to collaborate closely with Microsoft Research (WorldWide Telescope initiative) and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (Dataverse initiative).

My research will fall under several possible rubrics, including topics such as i) the semantic linking of literature and data in astronomy, ii) information visualization, iii) citation and discovery of research data, iv) network analyses of scientific collaboration communities in astronomy, and v) the study of the role of social media technologies on scientific dissemination practices.