You can watch the show on BBC iPlayer.
Read more about the computer models that were created for this show on the Portus blog. There you can also read a message by Prof. Simon Keay about the show.
Portus and ACRG work on BBC 1
CT and animation of coin hoard
My colleagues Grant Cox and James Miles have been doing some amazing computerised magic with a coin hoard, and I thought it was time I wrote about their work. Both of them work with me at the Archaeological Computing Research Group at the University of Southampton. The Selby coin hoard consists of a bunch of coins still in their original container. The thing was submitted to a CT scan produced and processed by Richard Boardman and Mark Mavrogordato (mu-Vis CT centre). The results of this were then arranged into a sequence of animation by James Miles while Grant Cox made an accompanying animation in 3DS Max of coins raining down on the container. The video is now on show in the British Museum as part of the permanent Citi money exhibition. Worth a visit!
SMiLE: excellence with impact
Our SMiLE (Social Media for Live Events) project is on an advertising high! On 25 July a SMiLE article appeared on the Research Councils UK website, under the Digital Economy theme. In fact, SMiLE emerged from the Southampton Digital Economy University Strategic Research Group, a group co-directed by Dr. Lisa Harris, coordinator of the SMiLE project. This post also reveals a teaser image of my network analysis of the SMiLE data, more about that later 🙂
SMiLE: But who is going to read 12,000 tweets?!
A second blogpost about the SMiLE project I am involved in appeared recently on the London School of Economics website. I wrote about the project’s aims before as Nicole Beale and Lisa Harris explained it on the LSE website earlier. This second blog post introduces a first glimpse at the results including a short discussion of Twitter network visualization and analysis. Exciting!
In fact, this second blog post reveals some of the really cool work the project members have been up to. MSc students here in Southampton have been busy using the collected social media data in creative ways for their projects. The project is also working with the Oxford e-research centre on a guide for best practice for using social media at conferences. But that’s not all! We are also working on depositing the entire social media archive with the Archaeology Data Service in York, and publishing some of the results in Internet Archaeology.
The rest of the blog post goes on to discuss some of the issues surrounding all this. How does one go about depositing an electronic social media archive? Lisa and Nicole looked into some of the comments of the conference delegates, provided in feedback forms, to get a more qualified picture of the issue and how to proceed. The blog also discusses the issue of developing an interface through which this dataset can be explored. Mark Borkum and I are looking at using network analysis tools for this. More on the network side of things will be revealed in later posts.
Have a look at the original article, definitely worth a read!
Networking The Connected Past
You can now explore how well networked everyone at The Connected Past symposium is!
The Connected Past will take place in Southampton this weekend. I made a network using the registration and abstract submission data. The nodes represent delegates and authors (orange), linked to their institution (green), country (purple) and the paper or poster they will be presenting. You can zoom in to the picture and pan. Javier Pereda helped me visualise it and created the flash tool. Many thanks Javier!
Have a look at The Connected Past network!
(requires Flash)
Maps of citations
These days it is easy to trace down heaps of literature on a specific topic. But how can you manage those mountains of scholarly information? I just read a cool article on citation network analysis, a set of metrics and visualisation tools that helps you to do just that.
Imagine a Google Maps of scholarship, a set of tools sophisticated enough to help researchers locate hot research, spot hidden connections to other fields, and even identify new disciplines as they emerge in the sprawling terrain of scholarly communication.
The article discusses Bergstrom and West’s Eigenfactor metric. More than just the number of citations an article receives, the Eigenfactor metric weights the source of the publication. So an article published in Nature that was cited 20 times will be more prominent than an article published in ‘The Hampshire Journal of Late Medieval Pottery’ cited an equal number of times. Citation networks are just full of stories about how researchers think, build on ideas and elaborate on them.
And I think this is extremely cool! Some of my own work on citation networks of archaeological papers will follow soon.
For now, do have a look at the awesome motion graphs on the Eigenfactor website. You can explore the evolution of the number of articles and their influence through time. Check out Anthropology for example under which all the archaeology journals are grouped. You will see that journals like Antiquity, Journal of Archaeological Science and American Antiquity have a relatively lower impact (according to the eigenfactor metric) compared to Current Anthropology and Journal of Human Evolution for example.
Interface workshop
Yesterday I chaired a workshop with Marco Büchler at the Interface conference in London. It was well attended and the discussion we got going was stimulating. You can download the presentation slides here or through the bibliography page. We also prepared handouts with a summary of the workshop and some software and bibliographic resources, download it here.
The workshop aimed to give an introduction to networks as a way of thinking. We covered some basic network ideas, visualisation and analysis. As an example we explored seven different English translations of the Holy Bible. Using networks we could see what sections were reused throughout the translations and what not. It turned out that throughout the centuries subtle and less subtle differences seeped into the translations, fascinating stuff!
Like everyone else at the conference I also gave a two minute lightning talk, really cool but challenging experience! Download the slides here or on the bibliography page.
Play with Digital Humanities attendees
For the Digital Humanities conference being held 19-22 June Elijah Meeks made a nice network of all attendants and their institutions. You can explore the network by zooming in and out, as well as trying out a radial visualisation. The University of Southampton is represented by our own Leif Isaksen!
The network consists of 621 points and 734 lines. The nodes represent attendants, institutions and papers. These are all linked up by drawing the necessary lines between attendants and their institutions and the papers they will present. The network is very fragmented, consisting of many small components (like the one Leif is part of for example). To me this seems to mean that most papers are presented by people of the same institutions or of a very limited number of institutions, and that many institutions are represented by just a few members.
There are two larger components however. One of them consists almost exclusively of researchers from the Centre of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. They mainly co-author papers internally and only in a few cases with researchers from other institutions. The largest component on the other hand consists of many different institution, the most prominent of which are University College London, University of Alberta, Indiana University, Virtual Cities/Digital Histories and Stanford University. The researchers of these institutions are (weakly) tied together by co-authorship of several papers.
Does this network seem to represent different academic communities? The largest component seems to be mainly US-based authors so maybe there is a geographical logic where US-scholars with existing US-collaborations are more inclined to present their work in California than researchers from other countries. But why is University College London part of this US-component (with a very weak link though) and King’s College is not, and why do these two prominent UK institutions not have any co-authored papers?
All these fascinating questions just come up in my head when looking at this network. These things are really fun to explore and force you to take an alternative perspective on things. You can see the academic networks at work! Curious what next year’s DH network will look like.
Awesome art by Aaron Koblin
Just saw this TED talk by Aaron Koblin, a digital artist who’s work has inspired me for a while now. His art shows stunning examples of the fact that we have so much data available everywhere that relates in unsuspecting ways. If we bother to add things up, like he does for hand-drawn sheep, Johnny Cash still images, flight patterns, $100 bills and even voice samples, we see surprising things emerge that you would not expect by just looking at a single image or sample. His work on flight patterns is stunning and has been exhibited in the New York MOMA recently.
Check out his work online. And check out his talk below. Believe me, you’ll be surprised!
ego-networks on LinkedIn and Facebook
LinkedIn just released a new feature: the InMap. It’s a tool that allows you to visualise all your contacts, and the relationships between them. In social network analysis terms that would be called an ‘ego-network’, where the ego is an individual (you in this case) and the network includes all of the ego’s relations and the relations between them. There are a number of apps available that allow you to do the same thing for Facebook.
One of the coolest features of these network visualisations is that they display clusters of friends that are strongly related in different colours. Although this is an automatic feature based on a simple algorithm, it manages to pick out meaningful groupings. In my case, for example, all my colleagues at the department of Archaeology here at the University of Southampton are grouped, another grouped are my fellow students from the University of Leuven and yet another one are my friends from the town where I grew up, Antwerp. With these groups you can identify professional alliances or groups of friendships which you might want to reinforce.
From this example you might gather that most of these groups have some sort of geographical logic behind them: you will be more likely to be friends with people you meet in person every day. Also, some clusters exist of people affiliated with the same institutions like universities. Although this might sound like a banal conclusions, it has two very interesting implications: physical proximity matters in creating (digital) friendships and, more importantly, is all but dominant for the evolution of your relationships. You will notice, for example, how some of your friends are actually bridging two groups, which made me think about how those two people actually got in touch in the first place. Was it through me? Or did I have nothing to do with their friendship? If so, how did their pre-existing friendship influence my choice of friends?
Have a look at your own ego-networks for LinkedIn and Facebook, and be surprised!
The SAGE handbook of Social Network Analysis
A new handbook is to be published soon by SAGE titled ‘The SAGE handbook of Social Network Analysis’. It is edited by John Scott and Peter Carrington. A full list of chapters can be read online.
Looking at the scope and contributors, this seems like another future reference-work by largely the same authors that brought us Carrington, Scott & Wasserman eds. 2005. Might just attest of the high institutionalisation (and North-American focus) of SNA. The scope is not limited to methodology though. A number of theoretical chapters are included, possibly as a result of the popularity of the idea of the network as a metaphor.
Some chapters might prove to be of particular interest to archaeologists, anthropologists and historians:
Network Theory: Stephen P Borgatti and Virginie Lopez-Kidwell
Kinship, Class, and Community: Douglas R White
Animal Social Networks: Katherine Faust
Corporate Elites and Intercorporate Networks: William K Carroll and J P Sapinski
Social Movements and Collective Action: Mario Diani
Scientific and Scholarly networks: Howard D White
Cultural Networks: Paul DiMaggio
Qualitative Approaches: Betina Hollstein
Kinship Network Analysis: Klaus Hamberger, Michael Houseman and Douglas R White
Workshop on Graph Data Management
I just came across this workshop announcement that might prove useful for archaeologists/historians using graphs to visualise and explore their data. In fact, one of the major benefits of network-based approaches for our disciplines, I believe, is network visualisation. Relationships are rarely visualised explicitly, let alone complex ancient systems. There are a multitude of techniques available to visualise these relationships and to stress some aspects of them in particular. I believe this workshop is all about different computational techniques for graph visualisation. Network-based approaches in our disciplines can definitely benefit from the results of this workshop.
I’ve added the full call for papers here:
The 2nd International Workshop on Graph Data Management:
Techniques and Applications (GDM 2011)
In Conjunction with the
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
(ICDE 2011)
16 April, Hannover, Germany
Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the application of graphs in different domains. They have been widely used for data modeling of different application domains such as chemical compounds, multimedia databases, protein networks, social networks and semantic web. With the continued emergence and increase of massive and complex structural graph data, a graph database that efficiently supports elementary data management mechanisms is crucially required to effectively understand and utilize any collection of graphs. The overall goal of the workshop is to bring people from different fields together, exchange
research ideas and results, and encourage discussion about how to provide efficient graph data management techniques in different application domains and to understand the research challenges of such area.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Methods/Techniques for storing, indexing and querying graph data.
* Methods/Techniques for estimating the selectivity of graph queries.
* Methods/Techniques for graph mining.
* Methods/Techniques for compact (compressed) representation of graph data.
* Methods/Techniques for measuring graph similarity.
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management for social network applications.
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management of chemical compounds.
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management of protein networks.
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management of multimedia databases.
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management of semantic web data (RDF).
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management for geometrical applications.
* Tools/Techniques for graph data management for Business Process Management applications.
* Tools/Techniques for visualizing, browsing, or navigating graph data
* Analysis/Proposals for graph query languages.
* Advanced applications and tools for managing graph databases in different domains.
* Benchmarking and testing of graph data management techniques.
PAPER SUBMISSION
Authors should submit papers reporting original works that are currently not under review or published elsewhere. All submissions must be prepared in the IEEE camera-ready format. The workshop solicits both full papers and short papers (e.g. experience reports, preliminary reports of work in progress, etc). Full papers should not exceed 6 pages in length. Short papers should not exceed 4 pages. All papers should be submitted in PDF format using the Workshop online submission system at: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/GDM2011/ All accepted papers will be published in the ICDE proceedings and will also become publicly available through the IEEE Xplore.
IMPORTANT DATES
* Paper submission deadline: November 01, 2010
* Author Notification: December 01, 2010
* Final Camera-ready Copy Deadline: January 01, 2011
* Workshop: April 16, 2011
WORKSHOP GENERAL CHAIR
* Jeffrey Xu Yu
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS
* Lei Chen
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
* Sherif Sakr
National ICT Australia (NICTA), Australia
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia
* Lei Zou
Institute of Computer Science & Technology, Peking University, China
Contact: gdm2011@cse.unsw.edu.au
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
* Sourav S. Bhowmick, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
* Stephane Bressan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
* James Cheng, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
* Jiefeng Cheng, University of Hong Kong, China
* Rosalba Giugno, University of Catania, Italy
* Claudio Gutierrez, Universidad de Chile, Chile
* Yiping Ke, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
* Xuemin Lin, University of New South Wales, Australia
* Victor Muntes, Universitat Politecnica De Catalunya Barcelona Tech, Spain
* M. Tamer Ozsu, University of Waterloo, Canada
* Ambuj K Singh, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
* Yuanyuan Tian, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA
* Haixun Wang, Microsoft Research Asia
* Yanghua Xiao, Fudan University, China
* Xifeng Yan, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
* Shijie Zhang, Case Western Reserve University, USA
* Peixiang Zhao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
* Xiaofang Zhou, University of Queensland, Australia
Archaeological Networks 