Using Twitter and its friends (big data, networks, and cyber) as a Microscope for the Social Sciences.
By Dr. Chris Arney
Twitter, perhaps the biggest of the Big (social media) Data, seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. What can be done with big data from social media and how can you use it to understand society are questions that I fre-quently receive from cadets in my network science classes and often come up in my conversations with faculty re-searchers when we discuss these issues as well. Is Big Data (social media, Tweets, Facebook) gathering really the mi-croscope of the social sciences as Duncan Watts indicates in his book Everything is Obvious? And how do the con-cepts associated with big data, Twitter, networks, and cyber all fit together in modern society undertakings or in military operations? While I can’t definitively answer these overarching complex and challenging questions, I can de-scribe some of the investigations that the cadets at USMA are conducting in this exciting area.
For several years, cadets in the Academy’s applied mathematics and operations research programs have taken required and elective courses in modeling, informa-tion technology, social network analysis, network optimi-zation, graph theory, cryptography, fundamentals in net-work science, cooperative systems, applied statistics, net-works and counterinsurgencies, and chaos and fractals. Read More
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