Link #4: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data – Elvio Castelli

by markpepe

Elvio’s Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data Task

I connected with Elvio’s assignment because we were thinking along the same lines: we have this data, we see a large cluster of connections, and we want to know why. We also both sought outside sources to help make sense of the data, Elvio used Google’s Page Rank System and I used Google Trends. Furthermore, we both looked into the reasoning that our peers used to make their 10 choices for the Golden Record Curation. I am not only curious about why people chose that music, but I was curious as why some pieces of composers were more popular than others. In my task (9.2), I looked at the Beethoven and Bach having the most targets. I want to know more!

In order to do this task we needed to be familiar with network theory; to know our edges and nodes. I wanted to explore network theory so I dug a little deeper. I found Borgatti & Halgin’s paper, On Network Theory (2011), and they say:

“The choice of nodes should not generally be regarded as an empirical question. Rather, it should be dictated by the research question and one’s explanatory theory” (p. 1169).

By looking at the sources (people) and targets (songs), I wanted to find empirical evidence as to why. Google Trends for which composers were searched more often. Looking through my classmates tasks for reasoning. I was looking to make inferences, but I couldn’t. What we were doing in this assignment was just looking at our network to see that a “pattern of ties in a network yields a particular structure, and nodes occupy positions within that structure” (p. 1169). I feel that I have been making a mountain out of molehill in this case. I was on the right track though, the “thing to note about network theory is that the core concept of the field – the network – is not only a sociological construct but also a mathematical object” (p. 1174). I wanted to know the qualitative because I already had the quantitative. That being said, there is more here for me to discover because I haven’t had the opportunity to explore the concept of flow between two nodes.

To conclude, this task was an excellent opportunity to see and use data. It allowed me to see what choices my peers made and to explore possibilities as to why by using network theory.

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