VFF: Bridging Structural Holes in Scholarly Social Networks

In this talk we explore the interplay between user activity in the scholarly social network HASTAC and the academic output of HASTAC Scholars. We relied on quantitative data collected from the publicly-accessible scholarly social network HASTAC and qualitative data collected from a survey of 123 students and recent alumni of the HASTAC Scholars Program. We explore a series of visualizations of the HASTAC network to show that Scholars who both collaborated online and published their academic work together bridge structural holes in the network. Lastly, we discuss the preliminary results of our study that tested the hypothesis that the activity of users on academic social networks is associated with academic output.