Cha Mi-young, a professor of cultural technology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, has won the prestigious Best Paper Award at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, the university announced on Wednesday.

The paper titled “The Emergence of Conventions in Online Social Network” was co-written by professor Cha and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems to verify the formation process of the social conventions on Twitter.

Social conventions have been of interest to social scientists for decades but since the formation processes are not visible they have only been probed by simple experiments and mathematical models.

Cha utilized a collection of tweets to track the birth of the retweeting convention over the first 3.5 years of Twitter’s existence.

“Retweeting” is to repost a tweet to one’s followers and attribute the content to the source on Twitter.

When Twitter was launched in 2006, it didn’t feature a “retweet” function, but after a user started using the word “via” to refer to others’ comments the method was adopted and spread dramatically.

The paper pointed out that early adopters of the retweeting convention were more active and well-connected than typical users and were influential or core users, who also adopted other new features of Twitter early.

Twitter finally rolled out an official built-in “retweet” function in November 2009.

Professor Cha concluded that conventions on the online social network emerged from the microblogging site’s users.

“The significance of this study can be found in the fact that it verified the formation process of convention through SNS from the analyzed data of a near-complete collection of tweets from the day Twitter had been launched,” Cha said.



By Park Han-na
(hnpark@heraldcorp.com)