Online Social Networks

The advancement in information and communication technologies (ICTs) has provided unprecedented opportunities for actors to interact with one another in the online sphere. At the same time, new ICTs have provided academic researchers a variety of computational tools to collect digital trace data and analyze online social interactions. In an era of a networked online environment, researchers across disciplines have embraced a relational network perspective to study social interactions on the Internet. As a result, since 2000 there has been an exponential rise in the study of online social networks, including hyperlink networks, Facebook friendship networks, reply and retweet networks on Twitter, and semantic networks. Online social networks are broad and interdisciplinary in nature, speaking to the interests of researchers in sociology, political science, geography, ...