Title: Cobwebs from the Past and Present: Extracting Large Social Networks using Internet Archive Data,
Abstract: Social graph construction from various sources has been of interest to
researchers due to its application potential and the broad range of technical
challenges involved. The World Wide Web provides a huge amount of continuously
updated data and information on a wide range of topics created by a variety of
content providers, and makes the study of extracted people networks and their
temporal evolution valuable for social as well as computer scientists. In this
paper we present SocGraph - an extraction and exploration system for social
relations from the content of around 2 billion web pages collected by the
Internet Archive over the 17 years time period between 1996 and 2013. We
describe methods for constructing large social graphs from extracted relations
and introduce an interface to study their temporal evolution.