arXiv subjects

Shane Mannion

Publications and source records attributed to Shane Mannion.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Identity Emergence in the Context of Vaccine Criticism in France

This study investigates the emergence of collective identity among individuals critical of vaccination policies in France during the COVID-19 pandemic. As concerns grew over mandated health measures, a loose collective formed on Twitter to assert autonomy over vaccination decisions. Using analyses of pronoun usage, outgroup labeling, and tweet similarity, we examine how this identity emerged. A turning point occurred following President Macron's announcement of mandatory vaccination for health workers and the health pass, sparking substantial changes in linguistic patterns. We observed a shift from first-person singular (I) to first-person plural (we) pronouns, alongside an increased focus on vaccinated individuals as a central outgroup, in addition to authority figures. This shift in language patterns was further reflected in the behavior of new users. An analysis of incoming users revealed that a core group of frequent posters played a crucial role in fostering cohesion and shaping norms. New users who joined during the week of Macron's announcement and continued posting afterward showed an increased similarity with the language of the core group, contributing to the crystallization of the emerging collective identity.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Interconnected Kingdoms: Comparing 'A Song of Ice and Fire' Adaptations Across Media Using Complex Networks

In this article, we propose and apply a method to compare adaptations of the same story across different media. We tackle this task by modelling such adaptations through character networks. We compare them by leveraging two concepts at the core of storytelling: the characters involved, and the dynamics of the story. We propose several methods to match characters between media and compare their position in the networks; and perform narrative matching, i.e. match the sequences of narrative units that constitute the plots. We apply these methods to the novel series \textit{A Song of Ice and Fire}, by G.R.R. Martin, and its comics and TV show adaptations. Our results show that interactions between characters are not sufficient to properly match individual characters between adaptations, but that using some additional information such as character affiliation or gender significantly improves the performance. On the contrary, character interactions convey enough information to perform narrative matching, and allow us to detect the divergence between the original novels and its TV show adaptation.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Correlation distances in social networks

In this work we explore degree assortativity in complex networks, and extend its usual definition beyond that of nearest neighbours. We apply this definition to model networks, and describe a rewiring algorithm that induces assortativity. We compare these results to real networks. Social networks in particular tend to be assortatively mixed by degree in contrast to many other types of complex networks. However, we show here that these positive correlations diminish after one step and in most of the empirical networks analysed. Properties besides degree support this, such as the number of papers in scientific coauthorship networks, with no correlations beyond nearest neighbours. Beyond next-nearest neighbours we also observe a diasassortative tendency for nodes three steps away indicating that nodes at that distance are more likely different than similar.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

A robust method for fitting degree distributions of complex networks

This work introduces a method for fitting to the degree distributions of complex network datasets, such that the most appropriate distribution from a set of candidate distributions is chosen while maximizing the portion of the distribution to which the model is fit. Current methods for fitting to degree distributions in the literature are inconsistent and often assume a priori what distribution the data are drawn from. Much focus is given to fitting to the tail of the distribution, while a large portion of the distribution below the tail is ignored. It is important to account for these low degree nodes, as they play crucial roles in processes such as percolation. Here we address these issues, using maximum likelihood estimators to fit to the entire dataset, or close to it. This methodology is applicable to any network dataset (or discrete empirical dataset), and we test it on over 25 network datasets from a wide range of sources, achieving good fits in all but a few cases. We also demonstrate that numerical maximization of the likelihood performs better than commonly used analytical approximations. In addition, we have made available a Python package which can be used to apply this methodology.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Fast degree-preserving rewiring of complex networks

In this paper we introduce a new, fast, degree-preserving rewiring algorithm for altering the assortativity of complex networks, which we call \textit{Fast total link (FTL) rewiring} algorithm. Commonly used existing algorithms require a large number of iterations, in particular in the case of large dense networks. This can especially be problematic when we wish to study ensembles of networks. In this work we aim to overcome aforementioned scalability problems by performing a rewiring of all edges at once to achieve a very high assortativity value before rewiring samples of edges at once to reduce this high assortativity value to the target value. The proposed method performs better than existing methods by several orders of magnitude for a range of structurally diverse complex networks, both in terms of the number of iterations taken, and time taken to reach a given assortativity value. Here we test our proposed algorithm on networks with up to $100,000$ nodes and around $750,000$ edges and find that the relative improvements in speed remain, showing that the algorithm is both efficient and scalable.

physics.soc-ph↗