Prelims

Half Title Page

SOCIOMETRICS AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Analyzing Social Networks to Manage Brands, Predict Trends, and Improve Organizational Performance

Title Page

SOCIOMETRICS AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Analyzing Social Networks to Manage Brands, Predict Trends, and Improve Organizational Performance

BY

PETER A. GLOOR

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2017

Copyright © 2017 Peter A. Gloor

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-113-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-112-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-725-6 (Epub)

Acknowledgments

The tools and methods described in this book have been developed and tested over the last 12 years in the Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) seminar. I am deeply grateful to all my instructor colleagues, and of course to the hundreds of students from the United States, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Chile, Italy, South Korea, and China who have contributed many creative ideas, and have taught me what works, and what does not.

The COINs seminar was started at MIT Sloan in spring 2005. In fall of the same year, the seminar morphed into a virtual distributed course joined by students from Helsinki, supervised by Maria Paasivaara and Casper Lassenius, students from Cologne tutored by Detlef Schoder and Kai Fischbach, and students from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) lectured by Christine Z. Miller. In the meantime, the seminar has also repeatedly been taught at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Santiago de Chile coached by Cristobal Garcia Herrera, and University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, where Michael Henninger has been the indispensable instructor. Since 2011, the students from Cologne have been coached first by Johannes Putzke, and since 2014 by Gloria Volkmann, while at University of Bamberg, students have been instructed by Kai Fischbach and Matthaeus Zylka.

The software tool Condor that is the basis of this course was started in 2003, when the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College under the leadership of Hans Brechbühl and Eric Johnson agreed to support Yan Zhao’s software development efforts as part of her Master’s thesis supervised by Fillia Makedon. For the next three years, Yan, ably supported by the algorithm genius of her husband Song Ye, built the first two versions of Condor, originally called TecFlow. End of 2006, she passed the baton to Renauld Richardet, who added Apache Lucene’s text processing capabilities. In 2008, Condor development continued in Switzerland at galaxyadvisors, funded by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation CTI. Michael Henninger, Hauke Fuehres, Martin Stangl, Lucas Broennimann, Marton Makai, and Kevin Zogg from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) worked on building a fundamentally revised version of Condor in the team of Manfred Vogel and André Csillaghy at the Institute for 4D technologies i4ds. Since 2013, Condor development is done by my colleagues at galaxyadvisors, Marton Makai, Hauke Fuehres, and Joao Marcos Da Oliveira, supported from 2014 to 2015 by Karsten Packmohr.

This book is the product of many people working together over 14 years, building the tools and methods described here. First of all, I am grateful to Ken Riopelle and Michael Henninger, who have been essential in making the social media analysis tool Condor accessible to a wider audience beyond programmers and statisticians. Ken created the first Condor videos, and wrote a comprehensive manual, the precursor of this book. Michael wrote the first tutorial for Condor in the COINs seminar at University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. Ken Riopelle, Michael Henninger, and Lucas Broennimann provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. Ken also contributed the last section of Chapter 3 of Part II.

My sincerest thanks to all of you, without your creative ideas, didactical talent, and Java development and software architecting skills, both the COINs course and Condor would not exist.