About the VOSON Project
The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed how humans interact; for some scholars, we now live in the "Age of the Network". As online populations grow and the quantity and quality of interactions improve with new technology, social scientists are developing new approaches for understanding the impact of online networks on social interaction and economic and political participation.
The vastness and dynamic nature of the WWW poses research challenges relating to data storage, management and computation. E-Research technologies address these challenges, facilitating collaborative access by distributed researchers to methods and large-scale datasets.
The Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Project is conducting empirical social science research into online networks and developing e-Research tools to faciliate this research.
Grants
The VOSON project has been supported by (or contributed to) the following Australian Research Council grants:
- DP0452051 "New Methods for Researching the Existence and Impact of Political Networks on the WWW" (Ackland and Gibson; 2004-2005)
- SR0567298 "Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON)" (Ackland, Gibson, O'Neil, Buchhorn, Bimber, Ward; 2005).
- LP0990974 "The role of online social networks in successful ageing: benefitting from 'who you know' at older ages" (H. Booth, R. Ackland and T. Windsor; 2009-2012)
New Research
VOSON research into online networks draws from the social sciences (primarily economics, political science and sociology) and other fields such as applied physics and the computer and information sciences. The following are some of the VOSON research projects:
- ".au Census Project" - analysis of large-scale crawls of the .au domain, providing insights into Australian online life analogous to what is learned about the "offline world" via the Census. A data sharing agreement with the CSIRO Information Retrieval Project has been signed.
- Environmental activist networks - use of hyperlink and content analysis to study emerging issues such as the contestation of nanotechnology
- Methods - data collection, network sampling and statistical inference
- Political party networks - investigating the web's democratising potential for fringe parties
- Abortion debate - hyperlink and content analysis of opposing coalitions
- Migration - analysis of online information for prospective migrants to Australia
- Social capital and online networks
New Tools
The VOSON System
The VOSON System is web-based software incorporating web mining, data visualisation, and traditional empirical social science methods (e.g. social network analysis, SNA). Web services facilitate access and sharing of distributed resources such as datasets, methods and computational cycles.
The VOSON System features: Linux operating system, PHP/javascript web interface (AJAX improves interactivity), MySQL database, Perl-based web crawler, Perl/C++ data manipulation/analysis, 3rd-party text analysis and visualisation tools.
Web mining/text mining. A web crawler and the Google API are used to identify hyperlinks between web pages. Page meta-data are extracted and page text content parsed using Link Grammar Parser.
Data preparation. Data are collected at the page-level, but analysis is conducted over aggregations of pages (network nodes represent organisations, groups or people, not web pages) by aggregating web pages into "pagegroups" or sites.
Data visualisation and analysis. Maps of the shortest path between a root node and other nodes are constructed using the Large Graph Layout algorithm. Simultaneous visualisation of all nodes and links is via the LinLogLayout force-directed graphing algorithm. Concept maps (for frame analysis) are drawn using statistical routines available in the R statistical software. Because of the large size of the graphs involved, much computational work is done in C++, making use of the Boost Libraries. Basic SNA measures are calculated at both the network- and node-level.
VOSON-sns
VOSON-sns is a Drupal module for collecting and analysing SNA data from a Drupal social network site. We plan to release VOSON-sns as an open source project in the near future. Note that once you have a VOSON account, you will be able to see VOSON-sns in action, since it is used to analyse interactions between VOSON account holders (via this site).
VOSON Data Provider Plugin for NodeXL
Soon, you will be able to access VOSON hyperlink network construction services from within NodeXL, which is an Excel 2007 template for analysing social media network data. So we are providing two ways that you can use VOSON for analysing hyperlink networks: (1) via the VOSON System (which you login to using a web browser); (2) via NodeXL. The VOSON System is a specialist tool for hyperlink network construction and analysis. NodeXL allows access to various types of social media network data, e.g. Facebook, Twitter and hyperlink networks (via VOSON). This is a great example of how e-research technologies (web services, in particular) can enable access to distributed research resources (data and tools). So, a NodeXL user in the United States, for example, will be able to access VOSON network data services (which are hosted in Australia) all from within NodeXL (as long as they have a VOSON user account, and they are connected to the Internet).