Calls network evolution in Ivory Coast

In this video, we present the dynamical growth of the calls network during a period of 12 hours at an arbitrary day. Dots represent calls, traveling from one antenna to the other at each hour. The edge color is related to the network community where the target node belongs to. It can be noticed that there is an explosion of calls after 6am, showing the dense structure of the network.

Human trajectories network evolution in Ivory Coast.

In this video, we present the dynamical growth of the human trajectories network during an arbitrary day. Dots represent users moving across the country from antenna to antenna. The edge color is related to the network community where the target node belongs to. It can be noticed that the network grows in a sparse way, mostly connecting nodes that are geographically close to each other. Other regions like the capital city (right bottom) concentrate most of the long distance edges.

Towards the consolidation of peace and national development, Ivory Coast must overcome the lack of cohesion, responsible for the emergence of two civil wars in the last years. As in many African countries, ethnic violence is a result of the way territories are organized and the prevalence of some groups over others. Nowadays the increasing availability of electronic data allows to quantify and unveil societal relationships in an unprecedented way. In this sense, the present work analyzes mobile phone data in order to provide information about the regional and ethnic interactions in Ivory Coast. We accomplish so by means of the construction and analysis of complex social networks with several types of interactions, such as calling activity and human mobility. We found that in a subregional scale, the ethnic identity plays an important role in the communication patterns, while at the interregional scale, other factors arise like economical interests and available infrastructure.

By means of the analysis of the emergent patterns from human trajectories and calling networks, we have characterized the interactions and resulting structure of the diverse geographical and social areas of Ivory Coast. From a social and ethnic perspective, we found that the linguistic identity plays a fundamental role in the communication patterns of this country. The Ivorian people, seem to preferentially communicate to those that belong to the same local community, but more drastically to those that share the same linguistic family. Yet these preferences are not equal to all linguistic families. The peripheral regions of the north seem to communicate with their adjoin southern regions more significantly than otherwise. This behavior may be explained due to economical reasons. The north side has to trade with the south and therefore that is reflected in the communication patterns observed. Another reason could be the result of domestic migrations from the less developed areas in the north to the southern and more economically developed areas. As a result, the Ivorian communication map is organized in two interacting regions located at the east and west side of the country. On this basis, we conclude that the geographical and social factors, whether cultural or economical, determine the structural features of the social interchange. In the sense that on a local and subregional scale, the ethno-linguistic factor determines the interaction patterns, while on a wider scale, the available infrastructure and economic facts play a major influence in the social dynamics.

Full text

Characterizing ethnic interactions from human communication patterns in Ivory Coast
AJ Morales, W Creixell, J Borondo, JC Losada, RM Benito
Networks and Heterogeneous Media 10 (1), 87–99