A Unified Framework for Equivalences in Social Networks
Azimuth 2020-05-27
In the tenth and final talk of this spring’s ACT@UCR seminar, Nina Otter will tell us about the mathematics of social networks.
She will give her talk on Wednesday May 27th at 5 pm UTC, which is 10 am in California, or 1 pm on the east coast of the United States, or 6 pm in the UK. It will be held online via Zoom, here:
https://ucr.zoom.us/j/607160601
Afterwards we will talk at the Category Theory Community Server, here:
You can join the conversation there if you sign in.
• Nina Otter, A unified framework for equivalences in social networks
One of the main concerns in network science is the study of social positions and roles. By “position” social scientists usually mean a collection of actors who have similar ties to other actors, while a “role” is a specific pattern of ties among actors or positions. Since the 1970s a lot of research has been done to develop these concepts in a rigorous way. An open question in the field is whether it is possible to perform role and positional analysis simultaneously. In joint work with Mason Porter we explore this question by proposing an approach motivated by ideas of a category-theoretic nature. In this talk I will introduce role and positional analysis, present some well-studied examples from social network science, and what new insights this approach might gives us.
