CemWEB
This semester, I (Eugene Medynskiy) will be working with Phoebe Sengers and Daniel Huttenlocher on the CemWEB project. A brief description of the project, as provided on the LIFE Research funding application follows. It's a bit formal and uptight, but such are funding applications. As the project gains form and momentum, I will be posting updates, results, and discussions here.

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During the first leg of the research, we will be concerned with creating software tools to efficiently collect basic information about LiveJournal communities and their members, as well as how membership in communities changes with time. We will also develop mathematical models and algorithms to represent and analyze community structure, relationships, membership, and how these change over time.
Later, we will use these tools to examine three separate topics:
(a) dynamics of community affiliation: when and why do communities experience a significant flux in numbers of people joining or leaving? Can these bursts of activity be tied to "real-world" events?
(b) dynamics of a given community's 'agenda', as tracked by changes to its "Interests" (a list of subjects selected by the community's moderators), posts, and the "Interests" of its members.
(c) metrics of community distance: how can we talk about the relationship between two or more given communities, even if they don't share any members or "Interests"? is it possible to group communities into common cliques? We will try to apply these findings to create a "community browser" that LiveJournal users may use to find new communities that they might want to join, or conversely to find and watch communities with, say, opposing political views.
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