Michele Coscia - Leveraging Rich Node Data for Cultural Analytics

When: 2024-02-05 14:00-16:00 (Tallinn time)
Where: online

The event is public via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/94927755198?pwd=VWpWU25DY1JlVFJsbDF4aUtyL3Zvdz09
Websites: https://www.michelecoscia.com/

Abstract – Complex networks are a powerful tool for cultural data analytics: they can provide intuitive visualizations to drive insights and knowledge discovery, they allow to find interesting structures in the data, and can be used to explain how specific processes unfold. Focusing on the latter, processes on networks can be represented as nodes attributes, for instance music genres (node attribute) played by bands (nodes) connected if they share members (edges). This seminar focuses on a series of techniques to perform node attribute analysis, which is a surprisingly underexplored topic in network science. I will present a few methods to estimate the network distance between two attributes (e.g. political opinions on a social network), to measure how concentrated a specific attribute is (e.g. kinship groups on a network of archaeological material culture), and to find clusters of node attributes (e.g. music genres in a music collaboration network). The seminar will conclude with an open discussion about which other research questions node attribute analysis can be applied to, and which new node attribute analysis techniques could be developed.

Additional information – Michele Coscia is an associate proffessor at IT University of Copenhagen. He mainly works on algorithms for the analysis of complex networks, and on applying the extracted knowledge to a variety of problems, especially in the field of Digital Humanities. He has a PhD in Computer Science (University of Pisa) and has previously worked at CID, Harvard University and visited Barabasi’s CCNR at Northeastern University.