kontakteve

Kontakteve is a term used in discussions of social network analysis and data-driven sociology to refer to a framework for analyzing contact events between agents in a network over time. A kontakteve event is any instance of interaction between two or more actors, including messages, meetings, calls, or shared activities, recorded with a timestamp and participant set. The core idea of kontakteve is to emphasize the temporal dimension of social structure by treating the network as an evolving sequence of events rather than a fixed graph. Metrics associated with kontakteve include contact frequency, inter-contact time, contact duration, and reach or exposure.

Datasets are drawn from phone logs, email archives, online communications, or event attendance records, and are often analyzed with temporal or dynamic network models. Applications span epidemiology and information diffusion, organizational communication, and marketing analytics, where understanding when and how people connect is crucial. Critiques focus on privacy, data quality, and the challenge of inferring causality from observed contacts. Kontakteve is related to but distinct from static contact networks and from broader temporal or event-based network models. See also: contact network, temporal networks, event-based modeling.