That was too fast thinking that I could get over jetlag in 24 hours. I was happy yesterday feeling nice for the whole day until it got me at night – I couldn’t sleep. This, as well as WiFi that didn’t work got me into reading What Binds Us When With Whom? Content and Structure in Social Network Analysis by Frans Stokman, downloaded just a few hours before that following a hint from Bill Ives

The paper gives me mixed feelings. From one side I immediately get into the feeling that Frans has some answers for a couple of community/network questions that has been fighting with:

• What is the difference between a network (individuals with their interconnections) and a community (something with a sense of a “whole – norms, practices”)? Why/when/how a network turns into a community?
• What is the difference between someone’s relation to a community as a whole and relations with it’s individual members? How those influence each other?

From another side, I’m feeling helpless – the paper goes in the theories and methods I don’t know. Directions for the answers I want are there, but I can’t get them out (I guess unless I change my PhD research topic and work for a few years on social network analysis :) I wish I’d have someone near by to translate the complexities into a language I can understand…

Anyway, the paper gives some leads. And Frans Stokman is at the University of Groningen, which is just a few hours away, so I can try to contact him to see where it goes.

And a quote:

In network evolution, two processes take place simultaneously. On the one hand, social actors shape the network by initiating, constructing, maintaining, and breaking up relationships. On the other hand, attributes (behaviour, opinions, attitudes) of social actors are partly shaped by their relationships. (p.24)

Hope jetlag gods will let me sleep now. To be posted in the morning :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/26.html#a1487; comments are here.

• Networking: YASNs vs. blogs
• Books on-line
• Relational qualities that promote effective knowledge sharing

Valdis Krebs in From Social Networking in Academia – The Erdos collaboration network:

Experts have long argued about the optimal structure of a person’s professional network. Some say that a dense, cohesive network brings more social capital, while others argue that a sparse, radial network, one that provides opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurial activity, equates to greater social capital. Erdõs’s network shows both patterns — a densely connected core along with loosely coupled radial branches reaching out from the core. According to Ron Burt — a leading expert on social capital — this structure may be the optimal pattern for success. According to Burt, radial ties reach diverse information and knowledge to create value, while the dense, trusted ties deliver value in discovered opportunities. For a complete analysis read Burt’s seminal work — The Network Structure of Social Capital[PDF].

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/11.html#a1426; comments are here.

• Socio-technological approaches to facilitating knowledge sharing across disciplines
• The Tipping Point and NLP
• Networking: YASNs vs. blogs

Ideas and presentations from conferences I visited, on community/knowledge mapping (see other themes).

It’s difficult to draw the line between community and knowledge mapping: in most cases you want to know not only who is there and what they are talking about, but more precisely who knows what. The two themes are here just for an indication of where most effort goes in a specific case.

Community mapping

SELaKT – Social Network Analysis as a method for expert localisation and sustainable knowledge transfer by Tobias Mueller-Prothmann and Ina Finke at I-KNOW

• abstract (and link to full-text if you are ready to pay), presentation
• really interesting presentation that I managed to miss; on SNA applied in KM context

Blogosphere community formation, structure and visualization by Juan J. Merelo, Beatriz Prieto, Fernando Tricas at BlogTalk 2.0

• abstract, presentation (OpenOffice format which I wasn’t able to open), wiki notes
• SNA (+tools) overview, results of analysis of Spanish weblogs
• if you are into SNA on weblogs talk to these guys!

Applying Social Network Analysis to a small Weblog Community: Hubs, Power Laws, the Ego Effect and the Evolution of Social Networks by Michael Schuster

• abstract, wiki notes
• bit of theory + case: community dynamics in (relatively closed) (relatively small) weblog community

Knowledge mapping

Supporting drug discovery research through knowledge modelling and integration by Edy S. Liongosari, Anatole V. Gershman & Mitu Singh at I-KNOW KM/learning track

• nothing is online so far, but you can check older presentation (3.1MB!) that gives an idea or check other publications
• interesting work on creating interconnected maps based on data from different sources…

Shared Conceptualizations in Weblogs by Anjo Anjewierden, Rogier Brussee and me

• abstract, presentation, wiki notes, my weblog post with incoming links
• generating networks of keywords (~conceptualisations) from weblog data

Ideas from MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing project

• community knowledge maps on large screens integrated with contact/presence awareness

Ontologies, topic maps, expert profiling, visualisations, etc.

Note: there was a lot on these topics at I-KNOW, check the program and special track on Semantic Web and Knowledge Discovery (many presentations are online).

Selected presentations (didn’t go personally to most of them!), all links go to .pdf files

• An Investigation into Sharing Metadata: “I’m not thinking what you are thinking”
• A Comprehensive Guideline for Building a Domain Ontology from Scratch
• Pervasive Knowledge Discovery: Continuous lifelong learning by matching needs, requirements and resources
• Discourse Visualization Strategies for a Comprehensive Medial Analysis of Cultural Science Communities
• A Case Study in Supporting Distributed, Loosely-controlled and evolvInG Engineering of oNTologies (DILIGENT)

This post also appears on channels BlogTalk and weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/13.html#a1282; comments are here.

• Methodology chapter: blogging practices
• The best part…
• Searching for knowledge as constructing personal learning experience

It’s always like that: looking for one thing you find many others.

Full paper behind Blog Epidemic Analyzer (for Anjo and Rogier :) – Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace by Eytan Adar, Li Zhang, Lada A. Adamic, and Rajan M. Lukose

And other papers from HP Information Dynamics Lab, especially those with titles that I found interesting:

• Privacy and Deviance
• How to search a social network
• Finding Communities in Linear Time
• Conversational Structure in Email and Face-to-face Communication
• Information Flow in Social Groups
• SHOCK: Communicating with Computational Messages and Automatic Private Profiles
• Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations
• The Dynamics of Reputations
• When Can I Expect an Email Response? A Study of Rhythms in Email Usage
• Eliminating Public Information Biases in Small Group Predictions
• Local Search in Unstructured Networks
• Protecting Privacy while Revealing Data
• Status as a Valued Resource
• A Market for Secrets
• Search in Power-Law Networks
• Friends and Neighbors on the Web
• Free Riding on Gnutella
• Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto – a ranking tutorial
• Competitive Dynamics of Web Sites

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/20.html#a1171; comments are here.

• Paper: Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?
• Can blogging replace communities of practice?
• Blogging about disabilities

Yesterday, taking a break from writing I was reading a paper about effects of visualising e-mail archives, Digital artifacts for remembering and storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments by Fernanda Viégas, danah boyd, David H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Potter, Judith Donath (try this or this if you don’t have IEEE access).

As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives. One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. While interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that the applications triggered recall of many personal events. One of the most striking and not entirely expected outcomes was that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users’ pasts to others. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.

Things to remember:

Example of SNA on e-mail data aimed to support individual and not corporate decision-makers. This makes me thinking about the potential “market” for tools aggregating and visualising data: may be they are more likely to be used by individuals to make sense of their own data, then by “someone” who wants to get a picture of what’s going on in a company (example: my struggle to choose between liveTopics and k-collector). People are selfish: I care more about my own archives than about my company’s :)

Inside the article there are some strong quotes on our dependence on external objects to think and to remember. I should expand on it one day, this is something that connects information and knowledge and explains why personal information management skills are important for a knowledge worker.

How much could be extracted only from e-mail headers, without any content analysis.

User reactions on interacting with systems visualising their e-mail archives:

• recalling stories associated with patterns in e-mail change and being eager to share them with others (“Given the opportunity to gain meaningfull access to date about oneself, people want to explore it and then share it with others” p.9)
• discoveries about oneself: e-mail use patterns, forgotten friends, connections between people, reflecting on relations

The most interesting finding in the paper is the fact that the users feel that visualisations themselves do not reveal stories behind them:

Some of the ways in which our users interacted with the visualizations are reminiscent of how people relate to photographs. People return to their photos to reflect on past experiences as well as to share aspects of their lives with others. Photographs themselves convey limited slices of the events they represent, but their presence allows the owner to convey as much or as little as they want in sharing the event represented. Although our stories are as deeply embedded in our email as they are in our photos, we rarely have access to any sort of “snapshot” of our email so as to have these deep reflections and storytelling opportunities. The higher-level view of our digital experiences is buried deep within the actual data. When users in our case studies began storytelling around the visualizations, we realized that these provided a missing link; they created a legible and accessible view for sharing and reflecting upon our digital experiences, without revealing too much. (p. 8)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/01.html#a1104; comments are here.

• What happens once you see patterns in the mess of traces you and others leave?
• LiveTopics wishlist or topic-based blogging support
• Blog is down

You can find overview of this theme on-line, so here I’d like to write about a couple of things that caught my attention.

In his speech Bruce Cronin did an introduction of theories, practices and tools “around” social networks. As I’m reading other weblogs (also papers) on the topic, that wasn’t much new. What I really liked is an opportunity to get a bit of conversation with not-blogging expert on social networks (he was aware of weblogs anyway :)

Next to other things I was wondering if being well connected (or being a broker) in a network is a function of personality type or job responsibilities/position in a company. Bruce couldn’t generalize from his experiences and suggested that both play an important role. Or it also could be that people with “networking” personalities much easier reach positions in a company that require being well connected.

Christian Van’T Hof shared his experiences on creating Good and Best practice database with KM cases (presentation should be on-line; paper is here). He talked about a trend of moving from IT based KM to a community-based KM with using nice metaphor of Borgs (from Startrek) and guilds. What I found interesting is not the trend itself (not new for me), but Christian’s suggestion that it will go back in search of the balance [later: see Sam Marshall about the same trend].

Tobias Mueller- Prothmann talked about usability evaluation for on-line knowledge communities (paper + presentation). He and his colleagues are working on usability evaluation questionnaires, which I hope to be able to use one day. It was very nice of Tobias not only to read How to get the most out of conferences by Scott Berkun that I linked to from participants page, but also use some ideas to make his presentation more fun.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/11.html#a739; comments are here.

• Developing reflexivity
• Links
• Conference blogging

Nardi, B., Whittaker, S, Schwarz, H. (2002). NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 205-242.

Abstract. Through ethnographic research, we document the rise of personal social networks in the workplace, which we call intensional networks. Paradoxically, we find that the most fundamental unit of analysis for computer-supported cooperative work is not at the group level for many tasks and settings, but at the individual level as personal social networks come to be more and more important. Collective subjects are increasingly put together through the assemblage of people found through personal networks rather than being constituted as teams created through organizational planning and structuring. Teams are still important but they are not the centerpiece of labor management they once were, nor are they the chief resource for individual workers. We draw attention to the importance of networks as most CSCW system designs assume a team. We urge that designers take account of networks and the problems they present to workers.

Authors use ethnographical research to document personal social networks in the workplace or, as they call them, intensional networks.

We choose the term intensional to reflect the effort and deliberateness with which people construct and manage personal networks. The spelling of the term is intended to suggest a kind of tension and stress in the network. We found that workers experience stresses such as remembering who is in the network, knowing what people in the network are currently doing and where they are located, and making careful choices from among many media to communicate effectively with their contacts. At the same time, ‘intensional’ also suggests a ‘tensile strength’ in network activity; we found our informants endlessly resourceful and energetic in their everyday collaborative activities within their networks. (p.3)

The authors define “an ongoing process of keeping a personal network in good repair” (p.9) as netWORK and suggest that it “tends to be hidden work, unaccounted for in workflow diagrams or performance evaluations” (p.5). Then they elaborate on specific characteristics of netWORK and illustrate them with examples from the study.

Key netWORK tasks:

1. Building a network: Adding new nodes (people) to the network so that there are available resources when it is time to conduct joint work;

2. Maintaining the network, where a central task is keeping in touch with extant nodes;

3. Activating selected nodes at the time the work is to be done (p.9)

Key actions: remembering and communicating.

See also for comparison with related research on: communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), actor-networks (Law and Callon, 1992; Latour, 1996), networks of strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973), knots (Engeström and Vähäaho, 1999) and coalitions (Zager).

From conclusions:

The reduction of corporate infrastructure means that instead of reliance on an organisational backbone to access resources via fixed roles, today’s workers increasingly obtain resources through personal relationships. Rather than being embraced by and inducted into ‘communities of practice’, netWORKers laboriously build up personal networks, one contact at a time.(p.25)

This study highlights the increasing role of personal network in doing work without explicitly looking at learning and knowledge sharing. Studies we do at work show that many people tend to rely on their networks while searching for information (which is related to learning). Supporting knowledge creation and sharing in social networks study is about similar things as well. All of this convinces me more and more that there is something wrong in studying knowledge workers without their networks, but I’m still struggling to understand how knowledge work and netWORK are connected.

See also: Knowledge networker

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/11.html#a715; comments are here.

• Optimal structure of a person’s professional network
• Discovering research connections
• 5 stages in e-moderating and more on collaboration tools for communities

George Siemens does a lot of work on his weblog, but still writes/points to interesting things:

• The Whole Picture of Elearning (check this one because visual is much better than words describes “the whole picture”)
• Edubloggers list
• Computer Programs for Social Network Analysis
• Data Mining Email to Discover Social Networks and Communities of Practice

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/23.html#a691; comments are here.

• Weblogging as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning
• Learning webs: introducing weblogs to support communities
• Making mistakes in public

This is something that was on my “to blog” list for a long time:

Knowing what we know: Supporting knowledge creation and sharing in social networks by Rob Cross, Andrew Parker, Laurence Prusak and Stephen P. Borgatti and earlier white paper with the same title.

These papers describe studies focused on analysing characteristics that promote effective knowledge sharing and then using those characteristics in social network analysis. Both papers are worth reading. The white paper provides a better overview of the study on characteristics of effective knowledge sharing. The journal article is more polished and packed with practical examples of SNA.

Relational characteristics that promote effective knowledge sharing (research method described in the white paper; the following citations are from the journal article, page 105):

• Knowing what another person knows

Knowing what someone else knows (even if we are initially inaccurate and calibrate over time) is a precursor to seeking a specific person out when we are faced with a problem or opportunity. For other people to be options we must have at least some perception of their expertise.

• Access

However, knowing that someone else knows is only useful if you can get access to their thinking in a sufficiently timely fashion. Access is heavily influenced by the closeness of one’s relationships as well as physical proximity, organisational design and collaborative technology.

• Engagement

People who are helpful in learning interactions actively thinking with the seekers and engage in problem solving. Rather than dump information, these people first understand the problem as experiences by the seeker and then shape their knowledge to the problem at hand.

• Safety

Finally, those relationships that are safe are often most effective for learning purposes. Being able to admit a lack of knowledge or to diverge in a conversation often results in creativity and learning.

Simple, powerful and research-based. Must-read for knowledge managers and interesting as a framework to think about weblogs as an environment for knowledge sharing.

[Sebastian, this is about knowledge sharing in a broader sense and includes learning side of it. I am curious to know if you can relate it to your research on weblogs and learning]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/26.html#a628; comments are here.

• Uses of TACIT LEARNING
• Knowledge networker
• Hewlett-Packard discovers communities of practice by analysing intenal e-mail exchange

Thomas Burg points to Visualizing Flows In Social Networks. Follow the links, they worth it!

Frederico Casalegno, Roberto Tagliabue, and Marco Susani presented an intriguing visualization of flows in social networks at last November’s Doors of Perception [Smart Mobs]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/20.html#a597; comments are here.

• Links
• Trip report (3): knowledge/community mapping
• Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace and more papers from HP Information Dynamics Lab