Towards understanding the lifespan and spread of ideas: epidemiological modeling of participation on Twitter

How ideas develop and evolve is a topic of interest for educators. By understanding this process, designers and educators are better able to support and guide collaborative learning activities. This paper presents an application of our Lifespan of an Idea framework to measure engagement patterns among individuals in communal socio-technical spaces like Twitter. We correlated engagement with social participation, enabling the process of idea expression, spread, and evolution. Social participation leads to transmission of ideas from one individual to another and can be gauged in the same way as evaluating diseases. The temporal dynamics of the social participation can be modeled through the lens of epidemiological modeling. To test the plausibility of this framework, we investigated social participation on Twitter using the tweet posting patterns of individuals in three academic conferences and one long term chat space. We used a basic SIR epidemiological model, where the rate parameters were estimated through Euler's solutions to SIR model and non-linear least squares optimization technique. We discuss the differences in the social participation among individuals in these spaces based on their transition behavior into different categories of the SIR model. We also made inferences on how the total lifetime of these different twitter spaces affects the engagement among individuals. We conclude by discussing implications of this study and planned future research of refining the Lifespan of an Idea Framework.