Inferring colocation and conversation networks from privacy-sensitive audio with implications for computational social science

Abstract

New technologies have made it possible to collect information about social networks as they are acted and observed in the wild , instead of as they are reported in retrospective surveys. These technologies offer opportunities to address many new research questions: How can meaningful information about social interaction be extracted from automatically recorded raw data on human behavior? What can we learn about social networks from such fine-grained behavioral data? And how can all of this be done while protecting privacy? With the goal of addressing these questions, this article presents new methods for inferring colocation and conversation networks from privacy-sensitive audio. These methods are applied in a study of face-to-face interactions among 24 students in a graduate school cohort during an academic year. The resulting analysis shows that networks derived from colocation and conversation inferences are quite different. This distinction can inform future research in computational social science, especially work that only measures colocation or employs colocation data as a proxy for conversation networks.