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Register a new userComplex Network Analysis of North American Institutions of Higher Education on Twitter
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Added by
Dmitry Zinoviev
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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North American institutions of higher education (IHEs): universities, 4- and 2-year colleges, and trade schools -- are heavily present and followed on Twitter. An IHE Twitter account, on average, has 20,000 subscribers. Many of them follow more than one IHE, making it possible to construct an IHE network, based on the number of co-followers. In this paper, we explore the structure of a network of 1,435 IHEs on Twitter. We discovered significant correlations between the network attributes: various centralities and clustering coefficients -- and IHEs attributes, such as enrollment, tuition, and religious/racial/gender affiliations. We uncovered the community structure of the network linked to homophily -- such that similar followers follow similar colleges. Additionally, we analyzed the followers self-descriptions and identified twelve overlapping topics that can be traced to the followers group identities.
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