Multi-Level Modeling of Quotation Families Morphogenesis
It provides insights into cultural dynamics for researchers studying online content evolution, but is incremental as it builds on prior meme dynamics work.
This paper investigates how quoted texts on social media change during diffusion, focusing on mutation rates and the formation of diverse families, without addressing network structure or diffusion patterns.
This paper investigates cultural dynamics in social media by examining the proliferation and diversification of clearly-cut pieces of content: quoted texts. In line with the pioneering work of Leskovec et al. and Simmons et al. on memes dynamics we investigate in deep the transformations that quotations published online undergo during their diffusion. We deliberately put aside the structure of the social network as well as the dynamical patterns pertaining to the diffusion process to focus on the way quotations are changed, how often they are modified and how these changes shape more or less diverse families and sub-families of quotations. Following a biological metaphor, we try to understand in which way mutations can transform quotations at different scales and how mutation rates depend on various properties of the quotations.