Modeling the world around us as network is indeed a complex piece of work. So how do we establish network between huge chunk of information flowing across internet. Classic example of the same is delivered by Mark Lombardi, an American neo-conceptual artist who specialized in drawings that document ideas/information as medium to be aspects. He tracked and mapped political, financial and corporate connections/networks to expose global financial frauds just by going over news articles available publicly. When you read his hand drawn maps you would realize that those news items have such great piece of information and they are related which might otherwise might not sound related if studied one by one.
In our world we are making connections that are not obvious. Make an attempt to study these connections and you will have revelatory results. Not because the personal and/or professional connections mapped would be new to you but because how distantly differentiable information can be courtly networked to make sense of things.
Let me start by analyzing my own Facebook Connections. So here I have people from all walks of my life. From school to college to work. Again in that set of connections some are those who am connected directly like my family and friends and some with whom am connected through my direct contacts. For example, my brother-in-law’s friend is in a bikers club which is my area of interest as well and hence we got introduced and now we are connected. Now when you have the connections mapped and if you analyze the information flowing between those connections with a low or high frequency, you can easily draw the patterns and get useful information out of the data. It could show that some people you are connected more than some others in the network. That how some people are more active on a particular group or community which could be outside of their direct contacts. This shows how you can understand quite a bit about someone without really knowing that person personally. And that kind of information could be useful.
This Network structure study of thousands of users using automated layout algorithms can easily be used to understand knowledge flow and the patterns. These in-turn can give insights into:
- how different structures influence different processes occurring on that network. For example how a piece of information goes viral.
- consumer insights to predict how a product or services can be received in the market and/or which feature in a product or feature if introduced or removed can create the required impact.
- how a particular network/community can be developed or grown
- how to create interventions to improve, reinforce or change the patterns of the knowledge flow. For example, what strategies can be used to may be diffuse an information to go viral.
and so on….
Now we understand that a network analysis in itself carry so much of information that can be made useful which otherwise is invisible to us, and hence this gives is nice insight into Why Social Network Analysis is important. My next post will be about some of the Network analysis tools and what can be drawn out of them… test
