Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Monday 18 June 2018

Visualising the network of human interactions

In 1928 Jacob Levy Moreno, a Vienna-trained psychiatrist who had recently emigrated to New York, developed an innovative way of identifying ‘at risk’ children. He analysed social patterns at the State Training School for Girls and the Riverdale Country School by asking students who their friends were, and charting their answers. The resulting graphs used geometric shapes to represent individuals and lines to indicate friendships: he called them sociograms. Noticing that two particular girls in the graph appeared isolated, he predicted that they would soon run away. They did.

The New York Times trumpeted Moreno’s ‘new geography’ in April 1933. Moreno’s sociograms mapped not the physical terrain but the world of affect, the ‘emotional currents, cross-currents and under-currents of human relationships in a community’. He agreed. ‘With [such] charts,’ he enthused, ‘we will have the opportunity to grasp the myriad networks of human relations and at the same time view any part or portion of the whole which we may desire to relate or distinguish.’

A while back I made one of these in an attempt to show that the process of doing science is much, much more complicated than the hypothesis testing model taught in school :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/04/fifty-shades-of-science.html
Of course one could expand this even further and delve into minute details, but then the usefulness of the thing would be lost. Similarly, I'd very much like to have one showing large-scale societal networks and the flow of information, money, and other factors that influence individuals and the resulting society. For example, information flows back and forth into the political system from a variety of sources : directly from the general public, via the media, scientists, etc... such information influences both the governed and the government in a feedback loop. Anyone know of such a plot ?

https://aeon.co/ideas/network-visualisations-show-what-we-can-and-what-we-may-know

1 comment:

  1. Nick Nielsen have you ever heard of such a graph or plot?

    ReplyDelete

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