Coloring in the Links: Capturing Social Ties as They are Perceived

Understand

The richness that characterizes relationships is often absent when they are modeled using computational methods in network science.

• Typically, relationships are represented simply as links, perhaps with weights.
• The lack of finer granularity is due in part to the fact that, aside from linkage and strength, no fundamental or immediately obvious dimensions exist along which to categorize relationships.
• Here we propose a set of dimensions that capture major components of many relationships -- derived both from relevant academic literature and people's everyday descriptions of their relationships.