Today I read a paper titled “Social network dynamics of face-to-face interactions”
The abstract is:
The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our understanding of the “microscopic structure” of a social tie
A social tie indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as face-to-face conversations or phone-calls
Analysis of data on face-to-face interactions shows that such events, as many other human activities, are bursty, with very heterogeneous durations
In this paper we present a model for social interactions at short time scales, aimed at describing contexts such as conference venues in which individuals interact in small groups
We present a detailed anayltical and numerical study of the model’s dynamical properties, and show that it reproduces important features of empirical data
The model allows for many generalizations toward an increasingly realistic description of social interactions
In particular in this paper we investigate the case where the agents have intrinsic heterogeneities in their social behavior, or where dynamic variations of the local number of individuals are included
Finally we propose this model as a very flexible framework to investigate how dynamical processes unfold in social networks