Towards discovery of eras in social networks

In the last decades, much research has been devoted in topics related to Social Network Analysis. One important direction in this area is to analyze the temporal evolution of a network. So far, previous approaches analyzed this setting at both the global and the local level. In this paper, we focus on finding a way to detect temporal eras in an evolving network. We pose the basis for a general framework that aims at helping the analyst in browsing the temporal clusters both in a top-down and bottom-up way, exploring the network at any level of temporal details. We show the effectiveness of our approach to real data, by applying our proposed methodology to a co-authorship network extracted from a bibliographic dataset. Our first results are encouraging, and open the way for the definition and implementation of a general framework for discovering eras in evolving social networks.