-------- Original Message --------
Subject: David's question -- networks, small worlds, and six degrees of
separation
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:15:58 -0600
From: Youngblood, Dawn <[log in to unmask]>
To: Maps, Air Photo & Geospatial Systems Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Dear David;
Measuring degree of contact between multiple individuals, places, or
groups of people -- or counting how they how they are connected -- is an
aspect of network theory more than just central place. You could
approach this in a number of ways. One would be to find all the
different means by which people in two places are connected directly,
from airplane routes, movement of economic goods or people between them,
etc. The other is to trace steps in a series of contacts to see how
close the connection is. For example, Tirana and Jabalpur might be
found to be connected by only a few steps in some fashion (e.g., legs of
a trip by air) but much less connected in other ways (news stories about
Tirana in Jabalpur papers). This is the popularized "six degrees of
freedom" concept: you know someone who knows someone, and pretty soon
you are linked to anyone in the world. Network analysis and theory will
let you analyze and understand the nature of these connections, how
central some cities, people, or things are in a web of connections, not
just in physical space.
American social psychologist Stanley Milgram developed a way to test the
theory, which he called "the small-world problem." He randomly selected
people in the American Midwest to send packages to a stranger located in
Massachusetts, several thousand miles away. The senders knew the
recipient's name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed
to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they
thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target
personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package
was personally delivered to its target recipient.
Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a
hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven
intermediaries to get each package delivered. Milgram's findings were
published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase six degrees of
separation. Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose
it as the title for his 1990 play. Milgram's findings were discounted
after it was discovered that he based his conclusion only on the very
small number of packages successfully delivered. It has been theorized
that six is less representative of the true distance between people than
of the maximum length a chain can be sustained without breaking down.
Six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in pop culture after
Brett C. Tjaden published a computer game on the University of
Virginia's Web site based on the small-world problem. Tjaden used the
Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to document connections between different
actors. Thus, the famous Oracle of Bacon. In 2001, Duncan Watts, a
professor at Columbia University, continued his own earlier research
into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet.
Watts used an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be
delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by
48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the
average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. Watts' research, and
the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry
related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory
such as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory,
corporate communication, and computer circuitry. Soooo..... it appears
to me that your patron is looking at small world phenomenon and social
network analysis and asking quite a lot of their map curator! But that
is okay because it is really a very interesting area.
For a great resource on network analysis, I would look at: Professor
Doug White's website on the matter: http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/
I am familiar with the research methods book illustrated to the far
right.
Link for Small World project:
http://smallworld.columbia.edu/press.html
Hope this is of some use. Best.
Dawn Youngblood
PhD, Anthropology / Archaeology
Curator, Edwin J. Foscue Map Library
Southern Methodist University
6425 North Ownby Drive
Box 750375
Dallas TX 75275-0375
[log in to unmask]
214-768-2285
-----Original Message-----
From: Maps, Air Photo & Geospatial Systems Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Angie Cope, AGSL
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 11:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: NOTICE: SMU's "Post" addresses to be removed:
http://smu.edu/help/post.asp - MAPS-L: Reference Question?
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: MAPS-L: Reference Question?
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 11:18:29 -0600
From: Salim Mohammed <[log in to unmask]>
To: Maps, Air Photo & Geospatial Systems Forum
<[log in to unmask]>
Hi David-
I guess contact with the rest of the world is a little vague. Who
initiates contact? Do tourists visiting these cities count? Does other
contact include mail, e-mail, phone count? Or are we talking simply face
to face contact? What about "sister-city" relationships? Just on a
practical basis, I can imagine one making an estimate made by tourist
numbers and perhaps internet cafes in these towns, plus perhaps talking
to the post offices in these areas. It's a difficult problem, even if
you are talking of a city in the developed world.
Best, Salim
Angie Cope, AGSL wrote:
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Reference Question?
> Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 11:45:45 -0500
> From: David Cobb <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
> Folks -
>
> Just when you think you've heard it all --- one of our students has an
> interesting question regarding cultural interaction. Specifically,
they
> wish to "measure" the amount of contact that the people of one city
have
> with the rest of their country and world? More specifically, they are
> looking at this relationship for Tirana, Albania; Blagoevgrad,
Bulgaria;
> Indore and Jabalpur, India? My instinct tells me there is some
indirect
> relationship here to central place theory but am wondering if others
may
> have some ideas -- all appreciated no matter how abstract. Thanks.
>
> David Cobb
>
>
************************************************************************
***
> David A. Cobb Tel. 617.495.2417
> Harvard Map Collection FAX 617.496.0440
> Harvard College Library Email:
[log in to unmask]
> Cambridge, MA 02138
HTTP://hcl.harvard.edu/maps
> ************************** VERITAS
****************************************
--
G. Salim Mohammed
Graduate Student, School of Library & Information Studies
Field Project Student, Wendt Library
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
[log in to unmask](608)442-0090(home)|(608)263-5674(wk)
"Live simply so others can simply live." - M.K. Gandhi.
--
|
