Knowledge Matters™

From time to time I run a half-day seminar called “Introducing Network Analysis as a Research Technique ”, followed by a practical workshop that builds on the mornings activities and introduces participants to UCINET and NetDraw .

Here are the seminar slides . The seminar is aimed at new researchers. Typically the seminar occurs in the morning and is organised into three sessions.

Here are the workshop slides . The workshop is aimed at absolute beginners, and introduces participants to UCINET and NetDraw . It builds on the seminar, although attendance at the seminar is not a prerequisite.

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Why am I blogging on Christmas Day? Well a bit like David Snowden I find blogging addictive, and a useful way to record my thoughts and ideas as they occur. And if that’s not enough it provides a means for an offsite backup for some elements of my doctorate. I am really enjoying my doctorate at the moment, so I thought I would share some of the work I did yesterday.

I’ve called this blog Deconstructing Complexity because I think it succinctly describes the four diagrams below. (I thank Patrick Byrne for the title, which he suggested after reading my Visualising Collective Knowledge post.) Consider the network diagram below. The circles are projects coloured by project type, and sized by in-degree, that is the number of incoming links. The links show reliance by one project on another, and are directed. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be reliant on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

Now at the moment I am sure you will agree the organisation in question is running a complex portfolio of projects. Paradoxically the detail in this diagram only allows for macro-decisions. ...

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Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because they elicit interesting management questions. Consider the network diagram below. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be critically dependent on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit, and sized by value. The large light blue project at the bottom of the screen is obviously the project with the largest budget. The lines represent the dependency and are coloured by the importance of that dependency – red lines representing a critical dependency.

As a manager where would you give priority to resource allocation? I suggest if you subscribe to the dollars view of the world the bulk of your effort would be directed to the light blue business unit. Now consider the next diagram. ...

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I am happy to enter into a discourse on “what is knowledge” but that is not the intent of this post. Rather I want to explore the idea that knowledge representation is becoming more visual. In his 1997 book ‘The Measure of Reality ’ Emeritus Professor Alfred Crosby suggested that visualisation and measurement were the two factors most responsible for the rapid development of all of modern science. Now this is an interesting proposition, and one I think I largely agree with.

The first attempts to represent knowledge were probably pictorial, and can be seen in the elegant cave paintings of our ancestors. Indeed some of these are still maintained by indigenous people today – see for example the Aboriginal rock art of the Gagudju people of Northern Australia, one of the oldest cultures on the planet. Numerals and text soon followed and have been the mainstay of knowledge representation for at least the last 6,000 years. But is this changing? ...

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I discovered a company called TouchGraph today, which as far as I can work out is in the United States. Their founding CEO is Alex Shapiro who created the original visual browser for Google! TouchGraph specialise in visualisation software, hence my interest. They say their focus is on “creating tools that enable decision makers to display, navigate, and analyze complex data simply and intuitively”. I decided to play around with their free products , which can map links in Google, Amazon and FaceBook. This visualisation maps my url - http://www.durantlaw.info/ - on Google. It is the initial visualisation. ...

Apparently the underlying algorithm maps similar pages. Similar pages do not directly represent inbound or outbound hyperlinks, but rather pages with similar content.

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