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1 May 2006

Sunbelt 2006

I write this as I return from the 2006 edition of the Sunbelt (social network) conference. I have had the privilege of many unanticipated bonus hours in various airports around the continent that have allowed me to get work done. I did not have time to post anything while I was in Vancouver, but my next few posts will be on Sunbelt, as well as on the political science conference I attended the previous week (the Midwest—it has been a busy couple of weeks). Today I will write about some of the observations from Sunbelt; later this week I want to discuss the contrast between these two conferences.

One of the more interesting presentations I attended was by Jim Moody of Duke. He presented some of the work he has been doing on dynamic networks, showing some of the moving pictures of networks changing over time. What was particularly striking to me was his illustration of the principle that when one takes into account timing of the flow of things through a network, ones perspective on key structural features of the network fundamentally changes. For example, the most central node in a network, e.g., as measured by betweenness, can look peripheral if one takes into account the timing of flow. If the most central node gets information slowly, information will flow around that node. A dynamic picture of flow in a network thus can produce a fundamentally different understanding of the structure of the network than a static picture. (I should note that a dynamic picture does not mean necessarily that the network is changing—just that there may be a natural sequence in communication, which may be a long standing structural feature of the network. That is, there is a difference between saying that networks are dynamic and that networks evolve over time.)

This isn’t a totally novel idea—in fact, I think it has been explored in the various research on traffic networks (a field that predates social network analysis), which has always dealt with networks and flow (Ana Nagurney did a very nice job of providing an overview of this field at her talk in the Fall in CCCSN). Nonetheless, it was something that I had not totally appreciated before.

This links back to something that I have written about earlier on the blog—the coming revolution in the study of social networks using behavioral data. It will, in fact, be possible to do an analysis of the scheduling of flows over networks in a fashion heretofore impossible (e.g., to see that Joe talks to Ralph, who then talks to Anne, etc).

A final note on the coming behavioral revolution—I made a wager (dinner) with David Krackhardt that 10 years from now the majority of presentations in Sunbelt will be using behavioral data—e-mail, phone, log, blog link structure, etc. There were certainly a lot more of these kinds of presentations in 2006 than in past years.

Posted by David Lazer at May 1, 2006 11:01 AM

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