VOSON Lab Overview and Research on Social Dynamics in Eating Disorder Communities on Twitter Event

The Web Science Institute is delighted to have Associate Professor Robert Ackland from the Australian National University here on Tuesday 29 ^th September. We will be providing a buffet lunch from 12:30 followed by a seminar from Robert 13:00 to 14:00 in Building 53, room 4025.  Please accept or decline by close of play Monday 28 ^th September by emailing Claire Wyatt .  If you have similar research interests and would like to meet him, he may have some free time in the afternoon. Please contact Claire Wyatt to arrange.

Abstract: In this presentation I first provide an overview of the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab ( http://voson.anu.edu.au ) at the Australian National University, which was established in 2005 and is advancing the social science of the Internet via new research, tool development, and the provision of research training. I then focus on an on-going big data research project involving the investigation of social tie dissolution (or “unfriending”), using a large-scale temporal dataset of people in eating disorder communities on Twitter (so-called pro-ana and pro-mia groups).

Robert Ackland

Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Australian Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. His PhD was in economics, focusing on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality. Robert has been studying online social and organisational networks since 2002 and his research has been funded by five Australian Research Council grants. His research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure . He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab ( http://voson.anu.edu.au ) which was established in 2005 with the aim of advancing the social science of the Internet by conducting research, developing research tools, and providing research training. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialisation in the ANU's Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in July 2013. He created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide.

More information can be found here: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj