[Asis-l] Online Social Networks As Crystals?

[davisc at indiana.edu]

Someone who has done a lot work on lattices in information science is a 
mathematician named Uta Priss (U.Priss at napier.ac.uk), formerly here at 
Indiana University in Bloomington.

I am taking the liberty of copying her on your message(s).

____________________________
Charles H. Davis, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow
SLIS; Informatics
Indiana University
812-331-1322, 812-320-2556 cell
812-855-6166 fax
http://mypage.iu.edu/~davisc


Quoting Murray Turoff <murray.turoff at gmail.com>:

> i seem to recall a study that by making assumptions on the stress and
> strain relationships between wood cells one could use fractals to
> actually illustrate or generate many of the different branching
> structures that exist among different types of trees to get the
> overall shape and relationships of the whole tree.
>
> It would seem to me that Fractals might be an approach to get a
> richness of structures that might be better related to social
> structures.  I certianly agree with Seth that crystal structures are
> too limited.
>
> On Feb 3, 2008 1:34 PM, Seth Grimes <grimes at altaplana.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Gerry Mckiernan wrote:
>>
>> > It has occurred to me that Online Social Networking [
>> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_service ] may be envisioned
>> > as Crystals [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystals ]
>> >
>> > Your Thoughts || Reactions / Related Research || Projects ?
>> >
>> > Are We In An Era of Social Crystallization?
>>
>> No, doesn't work.  Crystals are regular, stable lattices in
>> three-dimensional space of interconnected atoms or molecules of
>> homogeneous type.  While crystals may contact faults and impurities, what
>> makes them crystals is that they are *regular*, *stable*, and *in 3D
>> space*.
>>
>> Social networks are irregular, dynamic, heterogeneous in both node and
>> connection types.  Many social networks are only partly discovered in the
>> sense that many of the nodes and connections of real-world networks are
>> hidden.  For example, what are the "Six Degrees of Separation" between me
>> (Seth) and you (Gerry)?  I don't have a clue, but it's a good bet that
>> either you and I know some person in common or that you and I each have
>> acquaintances who know each other.  I can say this with some certainty
>> without know who the links in our chain are or what's that foundation for
>> the links, e.g., professional, personal, other.  If you're going to model
>> social networks successfully, you're to have to accommodate such unknowns.
>>
>> The commonality between crystals and social networks, I suppose, is that
>> both may be modeled as graphs.  But I'd think that analysing crystals as
>> graphs would have many shortcomings and simultaneously so much unused
>> theoretical power that you wouldn't bother.
>>
>> Nu?  Back to you...
>>
>>                                         Seth
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>
>
>
> --
> http://is.njit.edu/turoff
> ____
> 2008 Annual Meeting
> People Transforming Information - Information Transforming People
> October 24-29, 2008, Columbus, Ohio
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