Knowledge Matters™

I've just finished reading Methodological Pitfalls in Social Network Analysis by Nicholas Marschall. The central theme is that current methods produce questionable results, which is precisely why I read the book.

Running to 86 pages the book is an easy one-sitting read. For what it is it's also expensive. The book is a translation from German so in some places the English is - well unusual. Looking beyond this small problem, it appears to be a student or scientist research justification, or perhaps a short synopsis of a PhD, which means the style is very academic, but it is interesting!

Marschall quite rightly says data collection approaches colour results, and are full of implicit assumptions. He comes to the conclusion that size reduction and transformation processes, which are quite common in published studies, can significantly change the results of an analysis. ...

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I haven't been blogging lately - sorry! The reasons are I have been quite ill and have only just gotten over it; I am overwhelmed at work; and I have been trying to write my PhD thesis. I have neglected the thesis for most of the year, and decided it was getting away from me, so my discipline is to write something every day, which means blogging takes a back seat. Today I thought I would share with you a concept I call the Philosophical Trinity.

Choosing an appropriate research strategy is difficult. It requires a deep and honest reflection of one's own beliefs. It requires commitment to the relationship between the philosophical trinity, the research paradigm, and the research methodology or methodologies. The philosophical trinity answers the questions ‘What exists?', ‘How do I know?', and ‘What is valuable? Each question is a discipline in its own right, respectively known as ontology, epistemology and axiology. The philosophical trinity is depicted below.

Ontology is the philosophy of the world view of reality. Sometimes, and in particular in the systems thinking schools, world view is called ‘weltanschauung'. The seminal ontological question for a researcher is - ‘Is there a "real" world out there that is independent of our knowledge of it?' The answer to this question firmly positions the researcher into one of two schools. The first school is often known as the essentialist or foundationalist school, and the second rather unimaginatively as the anti-foundationalist school.

The essentialist school argues that there are fundamental and enduring differences in social phenomena that exist in all contexts and across time. Such a position means that social phenomena can in essence be decomposed to constituent parts. ...

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Matthieu Latapy is a network researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France. He is doing network research to counter peer-to-peer paedophile content - something I think we would all agree is very worthwhile!

Matthieu is conducting an experiment aimed at understanding how a real-world spreading phenomenon occurs via links between websites. In particular he notes that information diffusion is increasingly orchestrated by bloggers instead of the mainstream media. Matthieu's experiment takes the form of a viral marketing approach - hence the name Happy Flu.

To participate all you need to do is: ...

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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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On Friday the 4th of July 2008 I am once again running a half-day seminar called “Introducing Network Analysis as a Research Technique ”. This time the seminar will be followed in the afternoon by a practical workshop that builds on the mornings activities and introduces participants to UCINET and NetDraw .

The seminar and workshop are part of Canberra University’s Inter-University Research Workshop Program , and are aimed at new researchers. The workshop is also of use to anyone interested in network analysis, but is aimed at absolute beginners. Both the seminar and workshop are offered free of charge to research students and researchers from all institutions, but priority access will be given to students and staff from participating universities. Costs may apply to other participants. If you are interested and you are in Canberra on Friday the 4th of July 2008 you can register here . Further details about the seminar and workshop are below. ...

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Every now and then I come across an intriguing article that is also seminal to my interests and doctorate. Sociologica , which is the Italian Journal of Sociology, has just republished Harrison White's "Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure ". Harrison White is the Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, however his doctorate is in theoretical physics. White is very influential in network analysis and is sometimes credited with developing block-models - but I digress.

In this article White introduces the notion of a "catnet", where he brings together the ideas of categories and networks - hence catnet. The idea at the time was quite novel, yet now it seems obvious - people who are alike in some way will form networks (birds of a feather flock together). White's contribution was how to represent the various categories that might be found in a network. Further by bringing together network analysis and categories like race, gender, or education, he was able to show that categories are an artificial construct that aid understanding but of themselves are not sufficient. ...

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Sometime ago I posted some commentary about this study by Doctor Nicholas Christakis and Doctor James Fowler, who used network analysis to aid understanding of obesity. Their results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was an interesting study because it looked at 12,067 subjects over a 32-year period. Some of the results were truly frightening - if you have a close friend who is obese the chance of you becoming obese increases by 57%! But I digress. This time, Doctors Christakis and Fowler have used social network analysis techniques to aid understanding of the collective dynamics of smoking.

Again it is a very interesting study. Given the population is 12,067 subjects over a 32-year period it appears to be the same group used in the obesity study. A couple of findings were really interesting.

• First, smoker-clusters extend to three degrees of separation.
• Second, the size of the smoker-clusters remained the same across time, suggesting that whole groups of people quit at the same time.
• Third, smokers are found in the periphery of the total social network, suggesting smokers are increasingly being marginalized by their peers, family and co-workers. ...

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Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because I am actually not so sure about their utility, and would welcome any feedback you might have. That said I do feel they elicit interesting management questions.

Consider the network diagram below. For a change it’s a different organisation to the one we have been looking at in previous blog-posts , but I have applied the same principles. 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. This organisation assigns risk to six categories, which are shown as the red squares. The categories are real things in the real world rather than budget and schedule. ...

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I finally received formal feedback from the University of Canberra for the half-day seminar I ran on Wednesday the 30th of January 2008. The seminar was called “Introducing Network Analysis as a Research Technique ”, and was part of Canberra University’s Inter-University Research Workshop Program . Feedback is always welcome, but I was particularly chuffed this time. The graph below shows why.

I have reproduced below attendee’s comments verbatim. ...

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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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