SONIC welcomes Cristina Casareale, a visiting Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Protection at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona, Italy). During her 6 month visit, Cristina will work with SONIC to study the networks among the key players involved in response to the 2012 Costa Concordia maritime disaster.… Read the rest
by Johanne Saint-Charles and Pierre Mongeau
Adopting a socio-semantic perspective, this study aims to verify the relation between social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups and explore its modification over time. Data consist of video transcripts of 45, 3-h group meetings and weekly sociometric questionnaires.… Read the rest
Two SONIC papers will be presented at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Prague, the Czech Republic on the 24-28 of May 2018.
Tanaka, K., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2018, May). Origins of omission and commission errors in perceptions of group communication networks.… Read the rest
A paper, co-authored by Noshir Contractor will be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium, to be held on May 10-12th in Chania, Greece. The Symposium theme is “What leaders actually do.”
Mesmer-Magnus, J., Niler, A., DeChurch, L.A., & Contractor, N.S.… Read the rest
On January 30th, 2018, the Ph.D. Student Diego Gómez-Zará presented at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. This talk was organized by the program ENLACE
Diego’s talk was titled “The Role of Social Movements in Twitter: Evidence from the Chilean Student Movement”.… Read the rest
On January 24th, 2018, Noshir attended a workshop on Workforce Development and Intelligence Analysis, designed to gather information for the Decadal Survey of Social and Behavioral Sciences for Applications to National Security.
Anthropologists have long argued that fear of victimization through witchcraft accusations promotes cooperation in small-scale societies. Others have argued that witchcraft beliefs undermine trust and therefore reduce social cohesion. However, there are very few, if any, quantified empirical examples demonstrating how witchcraft labels can structure cooperation in real human communities.… Read the rest
Recently Aaron Clauset and his colleague share their new study: “Scale-free networks are rare”. In this study, they found scale-free network structure is not so prevalent based on their statistical analyses of almost 1000 network datasets across different domains. In particular, their results indicate only 4% of the datasets showing the strongest-possible evidence of scale-free structure and 52% demonstrating the weakest-possible evidence.… Read the rest
We are delighted to welcome Kitty Cheung as a post-baccalaureate researcher working with SONIC and ATLAS research groups at Northwestern University. Kitty received her undergrad at Northeastern University where she worked with Professor Brooke Foucault-Welles, a SONIC alum. During her six months with us, Kitty will research how startup teams assemble and how this impacts their future success.… Read the rest
A paper co-authored by SONIC’s Yun Huang and Noshir Contractor was accepted for publication in a special issue of the journal Complexity on “Emerging Applications of Complex Networks.”
Sha, Z., Huang, Y., Fu, J.S., Wang, M., Fu, Y., Contractor, N., & Chen, W.… Read the rest
…