For a few years, I’ve been sharing interesting networks as I come across them. Here is a gallery.
Category: Social networks
The road to nowhere… or explaining human cooperation
Here’s a new instance in a series of silly-dialogue blog posts (find others here, here, and here). Today, the study of the emergence of cooperation is a peculiar cocktail of applied math, behavioral economics, and theoretical population biology. I have found myself on either side of discussions about if this is the correct direction (depending on […]
The quiet revolution: When complex left networks
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 […]
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 […]
The importance of being earnest about the importance of nodes
One of the problems network science sets out to solve is to find important nodes. Of course, what is important depends on the context, but an applied scientist coming to network science for an answer probably has a clear idea of what it means in her study system. There is no shortage of methods in […]
Zachary’s Zachary karate club
If you haven’t heard about Zachary’s karate club, you should probably be careful calling yourself a network scientist in the wrong company. It is a small network data set that is used as an example and benchmark for community detection algorithms. It even has a club! The Zachary Karate Club Club. With a trophy going […]
Petter Holme 