微信群社会结构及其演化:基于文本挖掘的案例分析

Social Structureand Evolvement of Wechat Groups:A Case Study Based on Text Mining

微信已经成为移动网络用户进行信息交流、知识共享和协同工作的重要工具,但迄今对于微信群的成长规律、内部社会结构和群间衍生关系仍然缺乏深入了解。本文以在线社群理论和社会认同理论为引导,对9个真实的学术活动类微信群进行了案例研究,提出了微信群演化社会动因模型。采用统计描述、社会关系网络和文本挖掘等方法对群特征随时间变化情况和群内交流文本数据进行了分析,提出了群生命周期6阶段模型,定义了群成员核心度算法并据此对群内部社会结构进行了分析,发现了群外部社会属性、群内部社会关系对群生命周期变化及群间衍生关系的影响,以及群间演化的收缩机制与资源更新规律。

Wechat has become an important tool for the users of mobile Internet to exchange information, a sharing knowledge and collaboratively work, but we still lack deep understanding of the growth pattern and internal social structure of wechat groups and the derivative relationship between wechat groups. In this paper, we conducted a case study on 9 actual wechat groups which were initiated for academic activities and formulated a model of the social motivation for the evolution of wechat groups. Under the guidance of virtual community theory and social identity theory, we adopted statistical description, social network analysis and text mining approaches to analyze the change of 9 wechat groups＇ attribute data and their communication texts with time. We put forward 6 stages of wechat group lifecycle, defined the coreness algorithm and analyzed the internal social structure of a wechat group according to the results of coreness analysis, found that the external social attributes and internal social relationships of wechat groups influence their lifecycle evolution and intergroup relationships, and identified the shrinkage mechanism among related wechat groups and their resource updating pattern.