CCNSD interdisciplinary research projects on Twitter, Arms trade & Co citation maps By Dr Kosar Kari

Here at CCNSD, researchers from different backgrounds (e.g. physics, mathematics, business administration, and sociology) collaborate to understand the complex nature of social networks. In this presentation, I will give brief introductions into three empirical research projects currently underway in the center. Through these introductions, I am hoping to stimulate a discussion on the power and challenges of such interdisciplinary collaborations. In the first project, we use Twitter API for data crawling to answer a series of questions, including how social bots in Farsi Twitter have evolved in the past ten years, what are the patterns of interactions between bots and human users in Farsi Twitter, and what are the different patterns of propagation of true and false news on Twitter. In the second project that I will introduce, we use international arms trade data to explore the network mechanism through which the arms trade moved away from its polarized state during the Cold War. Finally, I will talk about the project on an intellectual mapping of the field of Middle Eastern Studies. In this project, which is an extension of my Ph.D. dissertation, we use data from Google Scholar to create longitudinal co-citation maps of Middle Eastern Studies in English and ask whether the social backgrounds of individual scholars can (partly) explain their positions in the intellectual network of the field.