The same network - different communities? The multidimensional study of groups in the cyberspace

摘要

Methods of social network analysis are evolving into the practice of analyzing multi-layer networks, which represent different dimensions of activity and relationships. This also applies to methods oriented to detect communities in order to analyze the relationship between groups on different layers. In this context, the purpose of this article is to answer the question of how much the communities in cyberspace overlap when studying a variety of forms of interactions. The authors analyzed the structure of user groups formed on different layers of a social network created among users in a virtual world. By extracting groups and analyzing their structure and relationship with one another, some interesting properties are shown, especially in the area of the groups' overlapping. By performing this research, the authors were able to discover how similar the worlds we create can be when we are using different forms of communication in the same virtual environment.