Having skipped the morning in favor of (a) sleeping in past 8a and (b) playing with Archie, I found the length of this day much more tolerable. Justin gave me a ride to the site, along with a couple of stray NetScientists who got stranded. The plus is I correctly pegged another draining math-centric lecture, but I also missed what some said was the best session of the lot (Mark Vidal). Ah, well … there was afternoon ice cream, vanilla and orange sherbert.
The most influential session for me thus far is the one Noshir Contractor of Illinois put on. He’s a jolly kind of guy; picture Apurva in 20-30 years. Nosh is the author of a key book in network theory, Theories of Communication Networks. He also lists as his core research: “Social drivers for creating & sustaining communities.” It had me wondering how soon I would have to convince Amy that living in Champaign-Urbana would be a good thing.
Other than discovering such alignment with my interests in networks, I came away from the afternoon lecture with a great sense of the theoretical landscape. Christian Briggs had just pointed me to a few of the theories mentioned by Nosh, most notably “structured holes.” There are many more, though, assembled in his book with Monge as a way to answer the question of social motivation to connect. Self-interest … resource exchange … mutual interest & collective action … contagion, balance, homophily, proximity … co-evolution. Everything seems to be contained in this one book, and supplemented by an upcoming paper he did with IU’s Stanley Wasserman in the Psych department. Further, Nosh examines different types of communites in terms of motivation strategy categories that utilize multiple theories of connection.
Although the usage is not the same as the one put forth by the Stone Center, Nosh also is the first presenter to use the word “mutuality” in context of networks. It seems to be more of another word for “reciprocity” (when directional links are shared between nodes), rather than the quality of the shared connection. I wonder where my usage of the word fits in, as a new CMDR (create-maintain-dissolve-reconstitute) theory or as part of one already discussed in the book. My head was also filled with ideas on how this might be used to track things like basketball passes and the decision making going on within the game.
Also (for the Entertainment Computing research group), Nosh just secured all 6 years of data from Sony for Everquest. We might want to contact him about doing getting some metrics for machinima papers.
I got to sit and chat with Reka Albert, who is mentioned a lot in Barabasi‘s Linked and as such was one of the “big” names I was looking forward to hearing. I mostly yammered, but got to talk to her about challenges in doing the grad school thing while raising a family. She’s a physicist, but her topic was about biological networks and was only partly accessible for me. Also, after striking paydirt with Nosh’s content, everything else is destined to be only interesting at best.
The take-homes for me in the final session were:
- Functionality in same bio network can be active under some conditions but not in others. This seems to be what, in part, allows for both differentiation and resilience in life. If all the right combinations of reactions don’t occur in the correct sequence, different outcomes emerge. It also makes me consider the question, What is the functional goal of a forum?
- As a network, the same biology can be viewed in terms of chemicals or reactions as nodes, each with a different kind of topology and dynamic. That might be helpful when looking at online forums in terms of participants, issues and goals.
- I wonder if the edges of a network might be constructed from edge elements. So, in order for a network connection to be considered “mutual” several kinds of edges have to be present to make the entire combination produce mutuality.
Off to bum a ride at Eigenmann. Ulrik Brandes, Kevin Boyack, Tom Snijders and Eric D. Kolaczyk on the docket today.
