A while back, I blogged a list of known research on social network sites. I’ve since moved that list to its own page:
I’m in the middle of doing a literature review and I’m worried that I might be missing new research in this area. If you have recently published a paper on SNS-related topics or know of new research in this area that’s not on my list, could you send me a link or add a citation in the comments? I’m particularly concerned that I know of very little research outside of the US and I have to imagine that there’s a lot taking place there that I simply don’t know about.
Knowing Germany, I’d suspect that there’s a bit of research in this area being done there. My first superficial search brouight the link below which, oddly, then introduces an American called Marc Canter. Since his name doesn’t figure on your list I thought I’d send the link just in case.
http://www.elektrischer-reporter.de/index.php/site/film/27/
Wish I had found your work sooner!
For the UK, I suggest you contact Lizzie Jackson:
http://lizziejackson.com/
Donath has a new paper “Is Britney Spears Spam?”
CEAS 2007 – Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, August 2-3,
2007, Mountain View, California USA
danah, there appears to be quite a few items in my own bibliography that are not in yours; a quick stroll through mine might be useful. I’d be happy to send you any more info or copies of articles.
The following articles immediately jump out at me as being particularly interesting or potentially useful (and not already in your bibliography):
Bumgarner, B. A. (2006). You have been poked: Exploring the uses and gratifications of Facebook among emerging adults. Unpublished Bachelor’s Honors Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Hodge, M. J. (2006). The Fourth Amendment and privacy issues on the “new” internet: Facebook.com and MySpace.com. Southern Illinois University Law Journal, 31.
Hsu, W. H., Lancaster, J., Paradesi, M. S. R., & Weninger, T. 2007. Structural link analysis from user profiles and friends networks: a feature construction approach. Boulder, CO: ICWSM ‘2007.
Rochau, M., Wobido, N., Mastilo, T., Pent, K., & Chapman, M. Ourspace: an investigation into the mediated social networks of danish teenagers. Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark.
Snyder, J., Carpenter, D., & Slauson, G. J. 2006. Myspace.com – a social networking site and social contract theory. Dallas, TX: ISECON 2006.
Vanden Boogart, M. R. (2006). Uncovering the social impacts of facebook on a college campus. Unpublished Master of Science Thesis, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.
Cliff Lampe has done some research on Facebook. He has a list of his papers, and PDFs of most, on his site. The most relevant titles are things like “A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network.”
I recently completed my undergraduate thesis on the visualization of social networks and the effects on the social experience in SN sites.
Up for download here
I think your SNResearch bibliography is really useful. I look forward to reading some of those papers that I hadn’t been exposed to yet. It would be really useful to have some type of RSS feed associated with that page, so people can see updates. It might be even more useful if people could directly contribute to it. Have you thought about posting your bibliography as a wiki, or using a common tag on del.icio.us or connotea?
I intentionally did not use a wiki or other group editable space because whenever I do, folks spam it with things that they want others to see and I don’t want to spend the time maintaining spam. I realize that folks out there have broader definitions of “research” and broader definitions of “social network sites.” I welcome anyone else to set up what they think is a useful resource site on whatever tools they can manage; I just want something that I can reliably go to to see peer reviewed, published academic work on sites that contain profiles and articulated friends lists. Sorry to be so rigid but I have a hard time wading through stuff and places like Google Scholar are so broken now that they accept anything. 🙁
Epolotics.com has picked up on an upcoming study that may be helpful.
http://www.bentley.edu/news-events/pr_view.cfm?id=502342&cid=RSS01
Thanks for doing this danah, it’s a super useful resource, and doubly thanks for acting as a gate-keeper and not making it completely open. It’s nice to know that the list is quality. I’ll send anything along if I see it and think it might be worth adding.
education.au is currently designing & building a social networking space for Australian educators.
* A proof of concept was built http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/tcotton/category/proof-of-concept/myedna/
* A taxomony-folksonomy research paper came out of it:
http://tinyurl.com/ypedqn (PDF 440kb)
* It’s now being turned into real project. See the blog:
http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/myedna2/
[note: education.au is sponsoring danah’s August visit to Oz to present 2 seminars.]
Pew Internet: Teens, Privacy and SNS
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/211/report_display.asp
Canadian High School Students on Facebook – http://geographyoffacebook.wordpress.com/
There is one here from Europe
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/pascu/index.html
The writers are based in Spain but come from other European countries
There is another from Europe really interesting with a discussion list. Here you are:
http://www.networkcultures.org/networktheory/index.php?onderdeelID=12&paginaID=54
Doesn’t this question itself suggest the need for an academic social networking site to post such literature review questions? Is there something already out there?
Returning from the meta level… your already-compiled list looks great.
This may be getting a little out of your scope, but there was an article recently published about individuation and interactive online journals:
Hodkinson, P. (2007). Interactive online journals and individuation. New Media & Society, 9, 625-50.
In March of 2007 Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Commission wrote a policy paper on SN and age verification.
Thanks a lot for sharing this, danah! AFAIK there’s not much academic research on social networks in germany (possibly due to the fact that SNS usage just had its takeoff recently with studivz.net). So I guess we’re a bit behind with research on SNS, although I’m sure there will be more research on this in the future (at least as far as I’m concerned).
I recently did a structural comparison of the popular german fotocommunity.de with flickr.com under the perspective of informal learning/communities of practice, but I guess that’s not exactly what you’re looking for (in case: http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/15f2703cfa24ea35a726317b2071a8ce2).
I put a link to your SNS research list on my blog, and by that way mentioned your del.icio.us and citeulike urls – i hope that’s ok for you (http://joerissen.edublogs.org/2007/08/15/danah-boyds-social-network-research-list/).
Its sort of ironic that we can’t trust collaborative systems to generated a shared list of research on social network systems. =) Seems like that’s a paper waiting to be written right there…
Do you include in your definition of SNS sites like del.icio.us, digg, flickr? All of which I believe have articulated profiles and contacts, but seem somehow qualitatively different than facebook, myspace, etc…