Understanding User Communities from Social Network Data

Understanding user communities and identifying change within them is important for a range of organisations, including those concerned with cultural heritage. In this paper we present an exploratory study which uses dynamic social network analysis of posts from the Tumblr blogging site relating to the Tate galleries to observe user community change. In addition, we apply two versions of topic modeling to the text of the posts in order to examine user community concerns and changes within these over time. In general, the most noticeable changes in topics within the user communities tends to occur when there has been a major physical change in the social network, such as an increase in membership, with these new members bringing new concerns and interests. After summarising the findings of our approach in detail, we propose practical methods which could be incorporated in to real time monitoring of user community change by cultural heritage organisations. ACM Classification