Infusing Social Networks With Culture

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a powerful tool for analyzing social phenomena that is based on studying how actors are connected or interact with each other. All Social Networks (SNs) are inherently embedded in particular cultures. However, the effect of cultural influence is often missing from SNA techniques. Moreover, to incorporate culture, modeling approaches have to deal with inaccurate, unrealistic, and incomplete cultural data. In order to address this problem, we propose a generic approach to systematically represent culture in the form of relevant factors and relationships, while leveraging relevant social theories, and to infuse them into SNs in order to obtain more realistic and complete analyses. Using two sets of experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our approach and demonstrate the significant advantages obtained through culturally infused SNA.