Dr Bernie Hogan

Bernie Hogan examines how to capture, represent and think about social networks, especially personal social networks. His work focuses on the role of design in social media, network capture techniques and theories of relationships.

Email: bernie.hogan@oii.ox.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)1865 287198

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Bernie Hogan (PhD Toronto, 2009) is a Senior Research Fellow at the OII and Research Associate at the Department of Sociology. With training in sociology and computer science, Hogan focuses on how social networks and social media can be designed to empower people to build stronger relationships and stronger communities.

Hogan’s theoretical work was among the first to identify the role of the social media platform as curator and to distinguish certian social media as the ‘real name web’. His practical work has shown how network visualizations can reveal new information to individuals from their social media data. He believes that the way networked information comes us in feeds is akin to being given a route through social space. This might get us where we want to go, but to truly empower people we need to see the map, not only the route along the way.

Hogan’s innovations in social network analysis began with his work at NetLab at the University of Toronto. With Barry Wellman and fellow graduate students, he introduced participant-aided sociograms as a means to capture social networks with pen and paper. He subsequently applied this to social media, and especially Facebook with the introduction of NameGenWeb, a Facebook network visualizer (with Joshua Melville). The second generation of this visualizer, CollegeConnect, was empirically shown to help high school students reveal social resources in their networks. Most recently, with Melville and collaborators at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern University, he has been working on Network Canvas. This software makes the collection of self-reported network data accessible to non-technical researchers.

Hogan has published in a wide variety of venues, from peer-reviewed papers in sociology journals (such as Social Networks, City and Community, Bulletin of Science Technology and Society, and Field Methods), in computer science proceedings (such as CHI, ICWSM, and CSCW) and related disciplines, particularly geography (with papers in Environment and Planning B, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie) and communication (with papers in New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, International Journal of Communication, and Information, Communication and Society). This is in addition to many chapters in books, grey literature reports and public opinion pieces. He is on the editorial boards of Social Media + Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Networks.

Public dissemination of research is a core part of Hogan’s work. With colleagues, he has worked with UK therapy organizations, Tavistock and Relate to produce guidelines on internet infidelity for patients and practitioners. He has also published related work in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. He has been featured on BBC 1 morning and Newsnight, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Vice and NBC in America. He is routinely featured on BBC 4 radio including as a mentor in Radio 4’s So You Want to Be a Scientist. He has given keynotes at conferences in France, UK, Switzerland and Japan.

As an academic Hogan is keen on service to the University and the wider academic community. He has run small academic seminars on Internet and Relationships at the OII as well as hosting the International Conference on Web and Social Media at Oxford in 2015. He was previously program chair for ICWSM in 2013 and 2014 and is currently a member of the ICWSM steering committee.

Many of Hogan’s papers can be found at his ssrn page and registered on his Google scholar. His ORCID is here. He is currently accepting graduate students on his active interests of names and naming practices, egocentric social networks, network visualizations, politics of social media and social identity, especially identity issues relating to gender and sexual minorities.


Latest blog posts

Current projects

Past projects

  • College Connect

    Participants: Dr Bernie Hogan, Joshua Melville, Dr Nicole Ellison, Dr Christine Greenhow

    College Connect is webpage that visualizes social networks automatically from Facebook and puts them to work for the user. The target market of the application is prospective college students as well as those just entering college or university.

  • Knowledge Exchange Networks: A Case Study in the Efficacy of Interactive Visualization

    Participants: Dr Bernie Hogan, Dr Monica Bulger, Joshua Melville

    Knowledge exchange implies forging, facilitating and fostering social connections. Oxford's Knowledge Exchange Network addresses this need among university staff and external stakeholders. We assist the KE Network through interactive network mapping.

  • Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age

    Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Bernie Hogan, Dr Nai Li, Dr Grant Blank, Dr Monica Whitty

    The project uses survey data from Australian and UK couples to look at the significance and impact of the Internet on intimate relationships, including how people use ICTs to meet each other and maintain relationships, and how ICTs affect their behaviour.

  • Who represents the Arab world online? Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa

    Participants: Dr Bernie Hogan, Professor Mark Graham, Richard Farmbrough, Clarence Singleton, Dr Heather Ford, Dr Ilhem Allagui, Dr Ali Frihida, Ahmed Medhat Mohamed

    Using Wikipedia to explore the participation gap between those who have their say, and those whose voices are pushed to the side, in representations of the Arab world online.

Chapters

  • Hogan, B.J. (2018) "Break-ups and the limits of encoding love" In: A Networked Self and Love Papacharissi, Z. (eds.) First.A Networked Self. New York, NY: Routledge. 113-128.

Conference papers

  • Jeon, G., Hogan, B.J., Ellison, N. and Greenhow, C. (2016) "First-Generation Students and College: The Role of Facebook Networks as Information Sources", Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing [CSCW ’16]. 27 February – 2 March 2016.
  • Polonski, V.W. and Hogan, B. (2015) "Assessing the structural correlates between friendship networks and conversational agency in Facebook groups", Proceedings of the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media,. 674-677.

Journal articles

Reports

  • Graham, M. and Hogan, B.J. (2014) Uneven openness: Barriers to MENA representation on Wikipedia. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
  • Hogan, B.J., Li, N. and Dutton, W.H. (2011) A Global Shift in the Social Relationships of Networked Individuals: Meeting and Dating Online Comes of Age. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
  • Fisher, D., Hogan, B.J., Brush, A.J., Jacobs, A. and Smith, M. (2007) Using Social Sorting to Enhance Email Management. Microsoft Research Technical Report. MSR-TR-2007-19.
  • Hogan, B.J. and Fisher, D. (2006) A Scale for Measuring Email Overload. Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-2006-65.

  • Online Social Networks

    An introduction to the analysis of online social networks, providing students with the tools necessary to undertake research on online networks, and to give an overview of the type of questions that these data can answer.

  • Wrangling Data

    This course will familiarize the student with a variety of techniques for cleaning and shaping data.

  • In Conversation with Mark Newman: The Future of Network Science

    Recorded: 17 February 2016

    Duration: 01:28:08

    Mark Newman discusses the emergent interdisciplinary field of network science and some of the current key challenges in the analysis of networks across the social and physical sciences.

  • Cultures of Wikipedia

    Recorded: 15 January 2016

    Duration: 00:10:26

    Presentation on Bernie Hogan's Wikipedia research, on the occasion of Wikipedia's 15th Birthday.

  • Wrangling Data: OII MSc Methods Option Course

    Recorded: 26 July 2015

    Duration: 00:02:42

    This methods option course for the OII MSc in "Social Science of the Internet" will familiarize the student with a variety of techniques for cleaning and shaping data.

  • Online Social Networks: OII MSc Option Course

    Recorded: 12 June 2015

    Duration: 00:01:38

    This option course for the OII MSc in "Social Science of the Internet" introduces social network analysis with particular emphasis on research design, data collection and analysis.

  • Partner Compatibility and Online Dating Sites: Interview with Erina Lee

    Recorded: 10 December 2011

    Duration: 00:04:37

    Erina Lee discusses the importance of similarity between partners in terms of long-term relationship satisfaction. She discusses some compatibility dimensions that have been considered by eHarmony, as well as future directions for research.

  • Scammers on Online Dating Sites: Interview with Monica Whitty

    Recorded: 10 December 2011

    Duration: 00:06:04

    Monica Whitty discusses her recent work on dating scams, which has focused on attempting to identify a typology of victims, recognizing the techniques used by scammers, and also the psychological impact of the scams themselves.

  • Online Social Networks and Everyday Life

    Recorded: 22 November 2010

    Duration: 00:04:06

    Bernie Hogan discusses the main themes of his lecture in the OII's "Society and the Internet" lecture series: how do individuals manage the blurring of public and private boundaries on general social network sites?

  • Relationships and the Internet (Public Panel)

    Recorded: 4 December 2009

    Duration: 01:22:22

    This forum looks at the state of the art of academic research on relationships and the Internet and how this research informs research on the social aspects of the Internet in general, such as issues of trust and identity.