Networks

I have been writing an article based on my thesis for two years now, off and on. In the article I take a little network that I’ve graphed, a simple network showing overlaps of texts between manuscripts. It’s a simple, simple idea. We’ve seen networks of manuscripts before; this is not really new, although, perhaps when I thought of it in my thesis in 2010 it was. I’ve just never seen people using social networks mapping software to actually do the mapping itself, not even in the past ten years where networks have become so fashionable even in the humanities. The networks I’ve seen have been done by hand, manually. So, the way I "do" networks is to enter an array of identifiers, an array that lists what manuscript is connected to another manuscript. I’ve done the entering to the array manually; that is, I constructed a spreadsheet based on the textual contents of manuscripts (mss from a certain time and geographic period). It’s basically a database that feeds the visual mapping. The software takes the array and graphs it.

And then in the article I wanted to add certain thoughts on networks in general. Not the kind of networks in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory so much as the mathematical networks that geneticists and physical scientists use. I wanted to put my mapping in that context--in context with the idea that there is a network pattern that evolves on its own, so to speak, with directed networks, in and out continents, islands, and an undirected network as well. This sort of thing is seen in this figure here, which is from Barabási’s book Linked.



The existence of islands and continents in the network is not something you can really prove with my data but I still think it's interesting. Anyway, I've been working on this for years on and off now. Typical academic stop and go stuff. I submitted it for review, had it rejected, stopped working on it while I finished something else, and so forth. I suppose I haven't posted about it because of this academic mindset where you can't post anything online; you have to come up with perfect finished thoughts and then publish them. Sure. I'll work on the perfection aspect. In the meantime, here's stuff.