What's the CRN?

Fortunately, I’m not alone in my research on complex networks, particularly scale-free social networks. In fact, besides the interest/research groups like the Center for the Study of Complex Systems or the Complex Human Networks Reading Group, and many others, I also found academic courses that are deeply related to this subject, one at the MIT Media Lab (where else), other at Simon Fraser University Surrey (close to Vancouver).

Sociable Media Group – MIT

The visualization of social networks undertakes a major leap in many of the projects produced by the Sociable Media Group (SMG) at MIT Media Lab. With some amazing visual displays the SMG “investigates issues concerning society and identity in the networked world”, addressing questions such as “How do we perceive other people on-line? What does a virtual crowd look like? How do social conventions develop in the networked world?”.

For more information about the Sociable Media Group click here.

For the list of classes at the Sociable Media Group click here.

Here are just a couple of examples:

Visual Who


Copyright Dana Spiegel, Danah Boyd, Jonathan Goler

For more information about this project click here.


Social Network Fragments


Copyright Danah Boyd, Jeff Potter.

For more information about this project click here.


Electronic Culture – SFU

The course given at Simon Fraser University is named Electronic Culture: Complexity, Identity, Society and it “explores the dynamics of networked culture, concentrating on rapidly evolving cultures of the world wide web.” As the teacher Laura Trippi describes, “we'll study scientific models of networks and complexity, and use them to investigate emerging networked social forms, from collaborative authoring and the ‘hacker ethic‘ to ‘smart mobs‘ and netwar.”

Some students in this course have interesting blogs, where they show their research and create their own models and prototypes, many of them analyzing personal networks in chat applications like AOL/Yahoo/MSN Messenger or their own Friendster network of friends.

Kirsten’s MSN Messenger Network


Copyright Kirsten Johnson

For more information go to Kirsten Johnson weblog.

Alanna’s Friendster Network


Copyright Alanna

Mapping Technorati/Daypop/Blogstreet


Copyright Alanna. For a larger version of this image click here.

For more information go to Alanna’s weblog.

Danielle Analysis of the class blogging community


Copyright Danielle

For more information go to Danielle’s weblog.


For a complete list of students (class network) blogs click here.

For more information on the Electronic Culture course click here.

For more information about Simon Fraser University Surrey click here.

Note
I must say that finding academic courses with analogous content then my thesis has helped me a lot gathering innumerous references, particularly in my recent research on visualization methods/techniques.