Studying Human Dynamics Through Web Analytics

When Tim Berners Lee, a physicist at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) first conceived the World Wide Web (WWW) in $1990$ as a way to facilitate the sharing of scientific information and results among the centers different researchers and groups, even the most ingenious of science fiction writers could not have imagined the role it would come to play in the following decades. The increasing ubiquitousness of Internet access and the frequency with which people interact with it raise the possibility of using it to better observe, understand, and even monitor several aspects of human social behavior. Websites with large numbers of frequently returning users, such as search engines, company or university websites, are ideal for this task. The properly anonymized logs detailing the access history to Emory University's website is studied. We find that a small number of users is responsible for a finite fraction of the total activity. A saturation phenomenon is observed where, certain connections age, becoming less attractive to new activity over time. Finally, by measuring the average activity as a function of the day of the week, we find that productivity seems to be higher on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with Sundays being the least active day.