The OpLaDyn team organized a Satellite Symposium at Networks 2021, that took place as a remote conference, on July 2, 2021 from 8:30 EDT to 12:30 EDT ( in your local timezone).
The formation and diffusion of opinions in a society, a typical object of study of social sciences, is also of interest for physicists and mathematicians as it can be formulated in terms of complex dynamical systems.
On one hand, different models have been proposed, which aim at understanding how the observed regularities, like consensus, polarization or fragmentation, emerge from a dynamics governed by the interactions among social actors. These models are stylized simplified versions of real societies which integrate, in general, the most widespread properties of human interactions considered by researchers in social human sciences.
On the other hand, the last decade has witnessed the generalization of the usage of social networks, leading to an unprecedented modification of social behavior and in parallel, allowing for large scale phenomenological studies of the outcomes of the dynamical processes going on in those networks. This has led to a wide collection of observations that, though limited to the users of these platforms, provide a widespread view in terms of geographical location, language and cultural aspects of the involved social actors.
Therefore the OpLaDyn team organizes this satellite to contribute to the entanglement of the theoretical and phenomenological approaches, which are still too often considered separately, into one that goes “from models to data and back”. We welcome contributions to this satellite from scientists of different fields, interested in the study of opinion and language dynamics seen as complex systems.