Combining Study of Complex Network and Text Mining Analysis to Understand Growth Mechanism of Communities on SNS

1. INTRODUCTION Japanese 7 higher educational institutions in Fukui prefecture started to cooperate with each other in the middle of 2008. The aim of this project called " F-LECCS " is in order to build " One virtual university environment " on a computer network by using open source software such as SNS (OpenSNP), LMS (Moodle), and e-Portfolio (Mahara). This open platform allows all the users to access learning resources across the universities, and enables them to form intercollegiate learning communities as the " Communities of Practice (CoP). The center system of the CoP is the social networking service (F-LECCS SNS) and has started to work on the beginning of April, 2009. On the F-LECCS SNS, over 300 communities and 360,000 logins (370 logins/day) have been made by the end of March, 2011. The CoPs are growing well. Our research interest is to understand the growth mechanism of communities on a SNS. Therefore, we combine the complex network analysis for understanding how network grows and the text mining analysis for understanding how people communicate.