Dr. Nitin Agarwal, professor of information science at UALR’s College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT), has published a book offering a comprehensive overview of the various concepts and research issues the various concepts web logs — or blogs.

“Modeling and Data Mining in Blogosphere” by Agarwal and his co-author Huan Liu of Arizona State University, elaborates on approaches that extract communities and cluster blogs based on information of the bloggers. It introduces techniques and approaches, tools and applications, and evaluation methodologies with examples and case studies. The book was published in August by Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

Blogs allow people to express their thoughts, voice their opinions, and share their experiences and ideas. Blogs also facilitate interactions among individuals creating a network with unique characteristics. Through the interactions individuals experience a sense of community.

“We elaborate on approaches that extract communities and cluster blogs based on information of the bloggers. Open standards and low barrier to publication in Blogosphere have transformed information consumers to producers, generating an overwhelming amount of ever-increasing knowledge about the members, their environment and symbiosis,” Agarwal said.

“We elaborate on approaches that sift through humongous blog data sources to identify influential and trustworthy bloggers leveraging content and network information. Spam blogs or “splogs” are an increasing concern in Blogosphere and are discussed in detail with the approaches leveraging supervised machine learning algorithms and interaction patterns.”

The authors discuss data collection procedures, provide resources for blog data repositories, mention various visualization and analysis tools in blogosphere, and explain conventional and novel evaluation methodologies to help perform research in the blogosphere.

Agarwal joined UALR’s Information Science Department as an assistant professor this semester. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State University earlier this year and a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the Indian Institute of Information Technology in 2003.