1335. sredin seminar: Fabio Ashtar Telarico: Comparing dynamic SBMs: The case of Slovene social scientists' co-authorship networks (1991-2020)
Comparing dynamic SBMs: The case of Slovene social scientists' co-authorship networks (1991-2020)
Fabio Ashtar Telarico
Despite being relatively young, the literature on blockmodeling networks representing relations between units in two or more time periods (so-called dynamic or temporal networks) is sprawling. Thus, there are already several techniques to blockmodel such networks. And they do vary in important ways (e.g., the definition of the network, modeling of temporal dependency), albeit it is not always clear how these differences affect final outcome. In this presentation we will present a dynamic blockmodeling analysis dynamic co-authorship network of social scientists in Slovenia based on data from the COBISS database. After providing a brief summary of the data-selection and preparation processes, the focus will be directed on the presentation and comparison of blockmodels obtained using different methods. Amongst the several methods offered in the literature, this presentation focuses on the stochastic blockmodeling (SBM) for generalised multipartite networks (also known as MBM; Bar-Hen, Barbillon, and Donnet 2022), the SBM for linked networks (Škulj and Žiberna 2022) and that for multilevel networks (Chabert-Liddell et al. 2021), as well the dynamic SBM (Matias and Miele 2017). Mostly, the presentation will focus on the partition produced by the MBM and introduce the other approaches by means of comparison. This choice takes stake of the results of previous simulation studies (Cugmas and Žiberna 2023), the specific properties of the co-authorship networks under scrutiny and preliminary results. Overall, this analysis provides both interesting methodological findings and suggestive, albeit still rather speculative, ideas for further substantive research.
PS. Kdor bi rad kaj povedal na naslednjih seminarjih, naj mi sporoči naslov teme in doda kratek povzetek.
Vladimir Batagelj
