Dear all,
Our Ralston Speaker this year, Dr. Clio Andris at Georgia Tech, is scheduled to give a presentation at the colloquium time (4:30 – 5:45 pm) on Thursday, March 11, 2021.
Please note that there will be an informal unrecorded chat session with the graduate students at 5:45 – 6:30 pm after the presentation. Looking forward to seeing you all next Thursday.
Time:4:30-6:30 pm on March 11
Speaker: Dr. Clio Andris (
CV)
Institution: Georgia Tech
Title: Spatial Social Network Analysis of the American Mafia
Abstract: Personal relationships are often represented as social networks: nodes (individuals or organizations) and edges between them. These systems are rarely mapped and analyzed as GIS data,
but mapping the locations of the people or organizations (nodes) in a social network and the relationships between them (edges) allows us to measure new properties such as obstacles to meeting, important nearby facilities, and paths of knowledge and information
flow across space. The goal of this talk is to describe interpersonal social network data structures and methods for embedding spatial social networks (SSNs) in geographic space.
The case study explored is a SSN of the American Mafia in the 1960s. We find that the network has bi-coastal ties within families and strangers who lived on the same block. We identify high-degree individuals, as well as differences in the geographic separation
between bosses and soldiers. Per the security-efficiency tradeoff theory and characteristics of small-world networks, we find that family-based ties acted more efficiently than non-family ties, indicating some evidence of top-down organization. New methods
described include the cluster/cluster matrix, network hotspot analysis, flattening ratio, route factor diagram, and general GIS spatial join and point pattern analysis methods. This research shows how to combine GIS and social network principles by measuring
node and graph properties and assessing these vis-a-vis properties of the built environment.
