In the course of social networking, MS. Rosanna gives us a comprehensive introduction to the concept, analysis and application of social networking. There’s also some basic knowledge of human cognition. MS. Rosanna’s lessons are lively and engaging. In general, I think I have benefited a lot, especially I not only have a deeper understanding of social network analysis, but also can use real data for analysis through group work and two programming tasks.
During the course, we selected SDGS that we were interested in and posted blogs to express our views on this goal. Then we commented on each other, so that I could not only learn the influence of social network on my selected SDG, but also learn more about SDG and the application of social network analysis by browsing the blogs of my classmates. Our programming assignments are based on these blogs and comments. The first programming assignment was a semantic analysis of comments on my blog, and the second one needed us to create a graph which represents the given sociomatrix, also count in-degree, out-degree, closeness centrality, shortest-path betweenness of the node representing myself. Through these two assignments, I have mastered the basic thoughts and skills of social network comment analysis.
Figure1: Sustainable Development Goals
Source: https://www.isglobal.org/en/-/global-health-inequities
Among these 17 goals, I focused on the eleventh: sustainable cities and communities. In the early stage of urban development, we only focused on the expansion of the city, the improvement of people’s income, and built many factories that caused huge pollution to the environment. Therefore, the ecological environment of the city is deteriorating, many water resources are polluted, and the air quality is also declining, which even affects the stability of the climate, and extreme weather occurs frequently.
Figure2: Gases from factories pollute the air
Source: https://kknews.cc/zh-my/health/ggyrbym.html
In my blog, I’ve detailed how social networks can help us make up for our mistakes and focus on sustainable urban development. But when working on the subject with my team, I found that my recommendations were not comprehensive enough. I used to think that the biggest role of social networks is to advocate for people to pay attention to the sustainable development goals and protect the environment. But when we dig deeper, we find that social network analysis has more specific uses. For example, we can use pictures and words about the weather posted by people on social media to help analyze air quality in certain areas. At present, the meteorological bureau’s detection equipment is not able to transmit data in real time, and there is a certain time interval between the data. But social media data is real-time and plentiful, and some studies have shown that combining these two kinds of data can get a more accurate prediction of air quality. At the same time, data analysis of social media can help us study the regional characteristics of air quality. For example, the air quality of one region changes over time, or the air quality of multiple regions can be compared.
Figure3: Map showing haze severity in near real-time between March 8th and March 9th in 2014 at the district level
Source:https://medium.com/pulse-lab-jakarta/nowcasting-air-quality-using-social-media-f478460784f5
To sum up, I am honored to be exposed to social networks and to learn that this technology or research approach can help us build more eco-friendly cities. Also, I am grateful to my classmates for their great research on SDGS they are interested in. By reading their blogs and watching their presentations, I can learn more about SDGS and the application of social network analysis to these goals.
Yue_yue 