Social Search: Exploring and Searching Social Architectures in Digital Networks

Content authors are increasingly using the Internet to network, providing each other with advice, collaboratively filtering important information, and creating virtual networks of trust. To adequately understand this social cyberspace, we must be able to search and explore the patterns and processes of group interaction. A novel software-based approach addresses this objective. The method is built on the concepts of social translucency and social network analysis, extending the latter by including keyword analysis, dynamic network visualization, and additional modeling properties. On the basis of these models, the authors suggest a visualization-based procedure for searching and exploring social corpora using combinable filtering algorithms. They offer two examples—an electronic discussion and a corporate email network—to demonstrate search and retrieval in networks. Their examples further yield novel insights into the actual dynamics of content dissemination and network evolvement among virtual network members.