Signal versus noise

• 1. Signal versus Noise
  Why Academic Blogging Matters:
  A structural argument
  Shawn Graham, RPA
  Department of History,
  Carleton University
  @electricarchaeo
  Image CC Paul Keller
  

2. Omniadisce; posteavidebisnihilessesuperfluum
Father Leonard Boyle, http://www.pims.ca/academics/boyle.html
Hugh of St Victor teaching three monks From De ArcaMorali (13th Century) Ms. Laud. Misc. 409, f 3v. The Bodeleian Library, Oxford
3. Size of the Internet
Carpenter, Brian. Observed Relationships between Size Measures of the Internet or Is the Internet really just a star network after all? 6.
4. Wayback Machine, Showing Yahoo on October 20 1996
5. Pagerank, according to Wikipedia
Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it; the link it has is of a much higher value. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
6. Needle in a Haystack,the finding thereof.
Image cc Graham Horn
7. Teaching the Machine
Image CC Derrick Bostrom
8. Segal, David. 2010 A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web. The New York Times, Nov. 26.
9. Understanding our signals
The web of responses to Colleens Week 2 of the Blogging Archaeology carnival
10. Noise
Results of search, Blogging Archaeology on Google.com (not a phrase-search), April 1 2010. After 20 minutes, nodes=8532, edges=8949
11. Network stats:
Diameter: 8
Average Path Length: 3
Filter the network so that only nodes with > 30 connections appear, reduces the graph to ~1.5 % of the nodes, and 10% of all the connections
Leaves us with 4 communities, per modularity detection.
12. Signal
The archaeological blogosphere: green
The cloud: light blue (Google, Amazon, Youtube,)
Social Media: Purple (Facebook, Twitter; also online newspapers)
News aggregators: Red (news.google.com)
Turns out, Colleen is the center of the world. Size of node = betweeness centrality
13. Roman Archaeology on the internet
14. Network Stats
Diameter: 10
Average Path Length: 6
Filter the network so that only nodes with > 30 connections appear, reduces the graph to ~3 % of the nodes, and 23% of all the connections
Leaves us with 9 communities, per modularity detection.
Results of search, Roman Archaeology on Google.com, April 1 2010. After 20 minutes, nodes=6240, edges=13 216
15. Signal.
Academia
Blogs & Twitter
Wikipedia
Google & News sites
Size of node = betweeness centrality
16. Reference links
Carpenter, Brian. 2010. Observed Relationships between Size Measures of the Internet or Is the Internet really just a star network after all?. http://bit.ly/dUjL89[April 1 2010]
Gephi.org. 2010. Gephi, an open source graph visualization and manipulation software. http://gephi.org [April 1 2010]
Jacomy, M. P. Girard, A. Delanoe. Navicrawler 1.7.3http://bit.ly/eUqTuR [April 1 2010]
Leonard Boyle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Boyle [April 1 2010]
Levy, Steve. 2010. How Googles Algorithm Rules the Web Wired March. http://bit.ly/9Pg9W8 [April 1 2010]
Segal, David. 2010 A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web. The New York Times, Nov. 26. http://nyti.ms/hR7Iqy [April 1 2010]
Singhal, Amit. 2010 .Official Google Blog: Being bad to your customers is bad for businessDec. 1. http://bit.ly/hsoRaX [April 1 2010]
PageRank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank[April 1 2010]