Misc

Earlier this year, my undergraduate research group surveyed a group of students in an attempt to find out how they spend their time online. They were also interested in how online social interaction might interact with personality. While personality didn't appear to predict how students use the internet, our sample was remarkably consistent when it came to documenting their typical behaviour online. Like many things in life, culture and groups dictate what becomes popular. Back in 2004, Myspace dominated but as the graph below shows, in 2014, Facebook still rules with Twitter in hot pursuit . Learn About Tableau

Michael Slater-Townshend  talks extensively about the merits of understanding your own and other online communities in this in this months Royal Statistical Society magazine. After following his advice, I have discovered that it is surprisingly easy to download your own Facebook data and see which of your friends form connected groups. Several apps allow you to download 'raw' Facebook data in a format that suits almost any statistical package. I used NameGenWeb . The resulting file can then be imported into a variety of statistical packages. I chose to use Gelphi  for this example. My unprocessed Facebook network looks like this... Each dot (or node) is a friend and the lines show friendship connections between each individual.  In order to make things manageable, I ran a cluster analysis to look for groups of people who are more connected to each other. This quickly produced three distinct groups. The larger ...