Abstract
Many naturally-occurring networks share topological characteristics such as scale-free connectivity and a modular organization. It has recently been suggested that a hierarchically modular organization may be another such ubiquitous characteristic. In this paper we introduce a coherence metric for the quantification of structural modularity, and use this metric to demonstrate that a self-organized social network derived from Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel interactions exhibits measurable hierarchical modularity, reflecting an underlying hierarchical neighbourhood structure in the social network.
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hallinan, J. (2003). Self-Organization Leads to Hierarchical Modularity in an Internet Community. In: Palade, V., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L. (eds) Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems. KES 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2773. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45224-9_122
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45224-9_122
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40803-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45224-9
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