Ike Net: Email and Friendship Evolution

Abstract Network evolution is an important problem for social scientists, management consultants, and social network scholars. Unfortunately, few empirical data sets exist that have sufficient data to fully explore evolution dynamics. Increasingly, more and more online data sets are used in lieu of offline, face-to-face data. The veracities of these findings are questionable, however, because there are few studies exploring the similarity of online-offline dynamics. The IkeNet project investigated online and offline network evolution. Empirical data was collected on a group of 22 mid-career military officers going through a one-year graduate program. Data collection included email communication collected from the Exchange server, as well as self-reported friendship, and time spent together, over a course of 20 weeks. Numerous attribute data on the individual actors was collected from their military personnel files. The data allows network scholars to conduct research into the dynamics of network evolution and allows educators a real-world example data set for use in classroom instruction.