Virtual Talk with Frank Takes
Abstract
A relatively recently emerged line of research is dedicated to harnessing large-scale population register data to address enduring questions within the realm of social science. In this presentation, we will specifically delve into the network dimension of such data, with a focus on data from the POPNET project, covering over 17 million people (i.e., the entirety of the Netherlands) and their ca. 800M family, household , school, work and next-door neighbor connections. We highlight the potential inherently present in this type of curated and comprehensive social network data through illustrative examples of results related to topics such as social capital, segregation, and migration. Furthermore, we will explore several methodological considerations and challenges related to under- and oversampling of individual connections through opportunity structures, including findings on the veracity of skewed degree distributions in the real world. We also highlight network-structure related concerns w.r.t. privacy, in particular disclosure risk and more in general the anonymization of network data for scientific research.
Bio
Frank Takes is an associate professor at LIACS, the computer science and AI department of Faculty of Science of Leiden University. His research interest is in network science, focussing on methods and algorithms for knowledge discovery from (social) network data, covering applications in economics, science studies and computational social science. He is head of the Leiden Computational Network Science research group, co-chair of the Dutch Network Science Society and academic co-director of the Dutch POPNET research platform for population-scale social network analysis.
Zoom Registration
Please register with office@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de to receive the Zoom login.