skip to main content
research-article

Check-ins in “Blau Space”: Applying Blau’s Macrosociological Theory to Foursquare Check-ins from New York City

Published: 18 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Peter Blau was one of the first to define a latent social space and utilize it to provide concrete hypotheses. Blau defines social structure via social “parameters” (constraints). Actors that are closer together (more homogenous) in this social parameter space are more likely to interact. One of Blau’s most important hypotheses resulting from this work was that the consolidation of parameters could lead to isolated social groups. For example, the consolidation of race and income might lead to segregation. In the present work, we use Foursquare data from New York City to explore evidence of homogeneity along certain social parameters and consolidation that breeds social isolation in communities of locations checked in to by similar users.
More specifically, we first test the extent to which communities detected via Latent Dirichlet Allocation are homogenous across a set of four social constraints—racial homophily, income homophily, personal interest homophily and physical space. Using a bootstrapping approach, we find that 14 (of 20) communities are statistically, and all but one qualitatively, homogenous along one of these social constraints, showing the relevance of Blau’s latent space model in venue communities determined via user check-in behavior. We then consider the extent to which communities with consolidated parameters, those homogenous on more than one parameter, represent socially isolated populations. We find communities homogenous on multiple parameters, including a homosexual community and a “hipster” community, that show support for Blau’s hypothesis that consolidation breeds social isolation. We consider these results in the context of mediated communication, in particular in the context of self-representation on social media.

References

[1]
Lauren M. Alfrey. 2012. The Search for Authenticity: How Hipsters Transformed from a Local Subculture to a Global Consumption Collective. Master’s thesis. Georgetown University.
[2]
Jie Bao, Yu Zheng, and Mohamed F. Mokbel. 2012. Location-based and preference-aware recommendation using sparse geo-social networking data. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. 199--208.
[3]
Michael J. Barber. 2007. Modularity and community detection in bipartite networks. Physical Review E 76, 6 (2007), 066102.
[4]
Sandro Bauer, Aanastasios Noulas, Diarmuid Ó. Seaghdha, Stephen Clark, and Cecilia Mascolo. 2012. Talking Places: Modelling and Analysing Linguistic Content in Foursquare. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT) and 2012 International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom). 348--357.
[5]
Jon Louis Bentley. 1975. Multidimensional binary search trees used for associative searching. Commun. ACM 18, 9 (1975), 509--517.
[6]
Peter Blau. 1977a. Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure. Free Press, New York.
[7]
Peter M. Blau. 1977b. A macrosociological theory of social structure. American Journal of Sociology 83, 1 (1977), 26--54.
[8]
Peter M. Blau. 1974. Presidential Address: Parameters of Social Structure. American Sociological Review 39, 5 (1974), 615--635.
[9]
David M. Blei and John D. Lafferty. 2007. A correlated topic model of science. Annals of Applied Statistics (2007), 17--35.
[10]
David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan. 2003. Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3 (March 2003), 993--1022. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=944919.944937
[11]
D. Brockmann, L. Hufnagel, and T. Geisel. 2006. The scaling laws of human travel. Nature 439, 7075 (2006), 462--465.
[12]
Carter T. Butts, Ryan M. Acton, John R. Hipp, and Nicholas N. Nagle. 2012. Geographical variability and network structure. Social Networks 34, 1 (Jan. 2012), 82--100.
[13]
Kathleen M. Carley, Eric Malloy, and Neal Altman. 2011. Multi-agent modeling of biological and chemical threats. In Infectious Disease Informatics and Biosurveillance. Springer, 361--D380.
[14]
Kathleen M. Carley, Michael K. Martin, and Brian R. Hirshman. 2009. The etiology of social change. Topics in Cognitive Science 1, 4 (June 2009), 621--650.
[15]
Zhiyuan Cheng, James Caverlee, Kyumin Lee, and Daniel Z. Sui. 2011. Exploring millions of footprints in location sharing services. In Proceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11). AAAI, 81--88.
[16]
Eunjoon Cho, Seth A. Myers, and Jure Leskovec. 2011. Friendship and mobility: User movement in location-based social networks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’11). ACM, New York, 1082--1090.
[17]
Catherine R. Cooper and Jill Denner. 1998. Theories linking culture and psychology: Universal and community-specific processes. Annual Review of Psychology 49, 1 (1998), 559--584.
[18]
Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist. 2011. Performing a check-in: Emerging practices, norms and “conflicts” in location-sharing using foursquare. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI’11). ACM, 57--66.
[19]
Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz, Jason I. Hong, and Norman Sadeh. 2012. The Livehoods Project: Utilizing social media to understand the dynamics of a city. In Proceedings of the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’12). AAAI.
[20]
David Dekker, David Krackhardt, and Tom A. B. Snijders. 2007. Sensitivity of MRQAP tests to collinearity and autocorrelation conditions. Psychometrika 72, 4 (Dec. 2007), 563--581.
[21]
Mark Deuze. 2012. Media Life (1 ed.). Polity, Cambridge, MA.
[22]
Bradley Efron and Robert Tibshirani. 1993. An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Vol. 57. Chapman & Hall/CRC.
[23]
K. A. Ethier and K. Deaux. 1994. Negotiating social identity when contexts change: Maintaining identification and responding to threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, 2 (1994), 243.
[24]
Laura Ferrari, Alberto Rosi, Marco Mamei, and Franco Zambonelli. 2011. Extracting urban patterns from location-based social networks. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN’11). ACM, New York, 9--16.
[25]
Santo Fortunato. 2010. Community detection in graphs. Physics Reports 486, 3 (2010), 75--174.
[26]
Marta C. González, Csar A. Hidalgo, and Albert-Lszl Barabsi. 2008. Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature 453, 7196 (June 2008), 779--782.
[27]
Paulo Guimaraes and Richard Lindrooth. 2005. Dirichlet-Multinomial Regression. Econometrics 0509001. EconWPA. http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpem/0509001.html.
[28]
John R. Hipp, Robert W. Faris, and Adam Boessen. 2012. Measuring neighborhood: Constructing network neighborhoods. Social Networks 34, 1 (2012), 128--140.
[29]
Kenneth Joseph, Chun How Tan, and Kathleen M. Carley. 2012. Beyond “local,” “categories” and “friends”: Clustering foursquare users with latent “topics.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN’12). Pittsburgh, PA.
[30]
Felix Kling and Alexei Pozdnoukhov. 2012. When a city tells a story: Urban topic analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. 482--485.
[31]
Pavel N. Krivitsky, Mark S. Handcock, Adrian E. Raftery, and Peter D. Hoff. 2009. Representing degree distributions, clustering, and homophily in social networks with latent cluster random effects models. Social networks 31, 3 (2009), 204--213.
[32]
Andrea Lancichinetti, Santo Fortunato, and Jnos Kertsz. 2009. Detecting the overlapping and hierarchical community structure in complex networks. New Journal of Physics 11, 3 (March 2009), 033015.
[33]
Aonghus Lawlor, Cathal Coffey, Rory McGrath, and Alexei Pozdnoukhov. 2012. Stratification structure of urban habitats. In PERVASIVE 2012.
[34]
Sune Lehmann, Martin Schwartz, and Lars Kai Hansen. 2008. Biclique communities. Physical Review E 78, 1 (2008), 016108. http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v78/i1/e016108.
[35]
Quannan Li, Yu Zheng, Xing Xie, Yukun Chen, Wenyu Liu, and Wei-Ying Ma. 2008. Mining user similarity based on location history. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS’08). ACM, New York, 34:1--34:10.
[36]
Wei Li, David Blei, and Andrew McCallum. 2012. Nonparametric Bayes Pachinko allocation. arXiv:1206.5270 (June 2012).
[37]
Janne Lindqvist, Justin Cranshaw, Jason Wiese, Jason Hong, and John Zimmerman. 2011. I’m the mayor of my house: Examining why people use foursquare—a social-driven location sharing application. In Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’11). ACM, 2409--2418.
[38]
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton. 1988. The dimensions of residential segregation. Social Forces 67, 2 (Dec. 1988), 281--315.
[39]
Sean Esteban McCabe, Wendy B. Bostwick, Tonda L. Hughes, Brady T. West, and Carol J. Boyd. 2010. The relationship between discrimination and substance use disorders among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults in the United States. Journal Information 100, 10 (2010), 1946--1952.
[40]
J. Miller McPherson and James R. Ranger-Moore. 1991. Evolution on a dancing landscape: Organizations and networks in dynamic Blau space. Social Forces 70, 1 (Sept. 1991), 19--42.
[41]
Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology 1 (2001), 415--444.
[42]
David Mimno and Andrew McCallum. 2012. Topic models conditioned on arbitrary features with dirichlet-multinomial regression. arXiv:1206.3278 (June 2012).
[43]
Il-Chul Moon and Kathleen M. Carley. 2007. Modeling and simulating terrorist networks in social and geospatial dimensions. IEEE Intelligent Systems 22, 5 (2007), 40--D49.
[44]
Anastasios Noulas, Salvatore Scellato, Renaud Lambiotte, Massimiliano Pontil, and Cecilia Mascolo. 2012a. A tale of many cities: Universal patterns in human urban mobility. PloS One 7, 5 (2012), e37027.
[45]
Anastasios Noulas, Salvatore Scellato, Neal Lathia, and Cecilia Mascolo. 2012b. Mining user mobility features for next place prediction in location-based services. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 12th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). 1038--1043.
[46]
Anastasios Noulas, Salvatore Scellato, Cecilia Mascolo, and Massimiliano Pontil. 2011. An empirical study of geographic user activity patterns in foursquare. In Proceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11). AAAI, 570--573.
[47]
Tore Opsahl and Pietro Panzarasa. 2009. Clustering in weighted networks. Social Networks 31, 2 (2009), 155--163.
[48]
Garry Robins, Pip Pattison, Yuval Kalish, and Dean Lusher. 2007. An introduction to exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks. Social Networks 29, 2 (May 2007), 173--191.
[49]
Adam Sadilek, Henry Kautz, and Jeffrey P. Bigham. 2012. Finding your friends and following them to where you are. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM international Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM’12). ACM, 723--732.
[50]
Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios Noulas, and Cecilia Mascolo. 2011. Exploiting place features in link prediction on location-based social networks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD’11). ACM, San Diego, California, USA, 1046--1054.
[51]
Thomas C. Schelling. 1971. Dynamic models of segregation. Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1, 2 (1971), 143--186.
[52]
David W. Scott. 2009. Multivariate Density Estimation: Theory, Practice, and Visualization. John Wiley & Sons.
[53]
Howard J. Seltman. 2012. Experimental Design and Analysis. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
[54]
Lynn Smith-Lovin and W. Douglas. 1992. An affect control analysis of two religious subcultures. Social Perspectives on Emotion 1 (1992), 217--47.
[55]
Tom A. B. Snijders. 2011. Statistical models for social networks. Annual Review of Sociology 37, 1 (2011), 131--153.
[56]
Karen P. Tang, Jialiu Lin, Jason I. Hong, Daniel P. Siewiorek, and Norman Sadeh. 2010. Rethinking location sharing: exploring the implications of social-driven vs. purpose-driven location sharing. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp’10). ACM, New York, 85--94.
[57]
Marisa Affonso Vasconcelos, Saulo Ricci, Jussara Almeida, Fabrcio Benevenuto, and Virglio Almeida. 2012. Tips, dones and todos: uncovering user profiles in foursquare. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 653--662.
[58]
Ruth van Veelen, Sabine Otten, and Nina Hansen. 2013. A personal touch diversity: Self-anchoring increases minority members identification in a diverse group. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (Jan. 2013).
[59]
Hannah M. Wallach, David Mimno, and Andrew McCallum. 2009a. Rethinking LDA: Why priors matter. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (2009), 1973--1981.
[60]
Hanna M. Wallach, Iain Murray, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and David Mimno. 2009b. Evaluation methods for topic models. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML’09). ACM, New York, 1105--1112.
[61]
Larry Wasserman. 2003. All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference. Springer.
[62]
Jing Yuan, Yu Zheng, and Xing Xie. 2012. Discovering regions of different functions in a city using human mobility and POIs. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’12). ACM, New York, 186--194.
[63]
Yu Zheng. 2011. Location-based social networks: Users. In Computing with Spatial Trajectories, Yu Zheng and Xiaofang Zhou (Eds.). Springer, New York, 243--276.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Generators or diffusers? Examining differences in the dynamic coupling of context and social ties across multiple types of fociSocial Networks10.1016/j.socnet.2022.02.00477(151-165)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2021)Detection of Sociolinguistic Features in Digital Social Networks for the Detection of CommunitiesCognitive Computation10.1007/s12559-021-09818-913:2(518-537)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2021
  • (2018)Blaunet: An R-based graphical user interface package to analyze Blau spacePLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.020499013:10(e0204990)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Check-ins in “Blau Space”: Applying Blau’s Macrosociological Theory to Foursquare Check-ins from New York City

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
      ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 5, Issue 3
      Special Section on Urban Computing
      September 2014
      361 pages
      ISSN:2157-6904
      EISSN:2157-6912
      DOI:10.1145/2648782
      • Editor:
      • Qiang Yang
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 18 September 2014
      Accepted: 01 December 2013
      Revised: 01 August 2013
      Received: 01 October 2012
      Published in TIST Volume 5, Issue 3

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. Foursquare
      2. community structure
      3. latent social space
      4. urban analytics

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed

      Funding Sources

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)15
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
      Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Generators or diffusers? Examining differences in the dynamic coupling of context and social ties across multiple types of fociSocial Networks10.1016/j.socnet.2022.02.00477(151-165)Online publication date: May-2024
      • (2021)Detection of Sociolinguistic Features in Digital Social Networks for the Detection of CommunitiesCognitive Computation10.1007/s12559-021-09818-913:2(518-537)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2021
      • (2018)Blaunet: An R-based graphical user interface package to analyze Blau spacePLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.020499013:10(e0204990)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
      • (2018)Analyzing User Behaviors: A Study of Tips in Foursquare5th International Symposium on Data Mining Applications10.1007/978-3-319-78753-4_12(153-168)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2018
      • (2017)A Large-Scale Visual Check-In System for TV Content-Aware Web with Client-Side Video Analysis OffloadingWeb Information Systems Engineering – WISE 201710.1007/978-3-319-68786-5_13(159-174)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2017
      • (2016)Measuring Similarity SimilarlyACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/28905108:1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2016

      View Options

      Login options

      Full Access

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media