Soon after networks became all the rage among statistical physicists, the field turned away from the home turf of complex systems science. This blog post argues for considering network science as distinct from complexity science. All is sketchy and subjective (from the viewpoint of a statistical physicist jumping on the complex-networks bandwagon). I can think […]
Category: Networks
The absolutely most fundamental
I recently revisited some social network classics, and this post collects random thoughts about them. In sum, I want to cheer on research on the foundations of social network theory. Not because the house would crumble without stronger foundations but because that’s where the coolest future discoveries will be. These reflections are rough, quick, and […]
Intro video to the history and ideas of complexity science and networks
I needed a video presenting the historical development of ideas behind the complexity and network science in 20 minutes—an impossible task of course (especially since I couldn’t spend too much time on prepping it). Anyway, someone out there could be interested, so here it is: Some credits not stated in the video: The starling murmuration […]
Good idea! But it’s already been explored by geographers
This post is an attempt to start a Mexican wave among computational social scientists (not only the urban science crowd) for the golden age of structural geography—the 1960s-80s. The main point is not to say geographers should have more credit but that literature from that era is a treasure trove of ideas. Neither is the […]
The network scientist’s survival kit
Throughout the scientific disciplines, core values, methodologies, and worldviews vary to a frustrating degree. Network scientists are interdisciplinary. Through years of catching up with our disciplinary colleagues, we have learned to understand other disciplines better than many scientists of those disciplines understand us. Such a fundamental thing as who a scientific result should benefit, and […]
Using networks to design an Indian village
Notes on the Synthesis of Form by maverick architect/mathematician Christopher Alexander belongs to the canon of design theory. In 150 pages of youthful enthusiasm, Alexander brings together D’Arcy Thompson, cosmology, modernist architecture, anthropology, and his own algorithm to hierarchically decompose a graph. In 1962, two years before the publication of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, […]
Compartmental models, networks and the coronavirus
It’s March 25, 2020, and the whole world is (or should be) battling the worst disease outbreak in anyone’s memory. It is definitely a unique situation in that it is the first emerging pandemics in the era of social media, so we get the full spectrum of information—from hard facts to nonsense—all filtered through the […]
10 papers of the 10s
Here I will list my ten favorite papers of the 2010s related to my research. It’s not an ordered list, and it will not be too serious, so don’t hate me if your paper is not on the list. Here we go: R Bliege Bird, E Ready, EA Power, The social significance of subtle signals, […]
Frozen weighted network
Yesterday a paper by Mason Porter, Hiroki Sayama, and myself was published in Frontiers for Young Minds. It attempts to present network centrality to the Frozen generation. In the spirit of data sharing, you can find the raw data below. It is the undirected network of who talks to whom and how many lines they […]
Firsts in network science
I revised this post after comments from Urska Demsar, Travis Gibson, Des Higham, Carl Nordlund, Mason Porter, Max Schich, Jan Peter Schäfermeyer, Johan Ugander, Balazs Vedres, and Jean-Gabriel Young. Thanks! Our field is interdisciplinary, and many smart people have been thinking about similar things. No wonder things get reinvented and rediscovered many times. I don’t […]
Petter Holme 