208B: The Small-world problem, six degrees of separation, etc.

Tue Mar 16 2004 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Haikus for Wednesday:

**Really six degrees?
Did Milgram possibly cheat?
Maybe Kleinfeld's cheap?

Studying online,
can cause headaches all the time,
your info is mine!**

The readings for Wednesday were:

Travers, J and Milgram S, An Experimental Study of the small world problem, Sociometry 32(4), 425-443 (1969)
J S Kleinfeld, The small world problem Society 39(2), 61-66 (2002).
Dodds, Muhamad, Watts, An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks Science 301 (August 8, 2003).
Garton, Haythornthwaite, Wellman, "Studying On-Line Scoial Networks," pp 75-105 in Steve Jones (ed) Doing Internet Reserach (Sage 1999).

I found this set of readings interesting in the sense it was nice to see Milgram's state-of-the-art study, a very harsh critique and a very recent empirical vindication of Milgram. Kleinfeld goes a little over the top in his/her criticism of Milgram's research (The guy is dead! How the hell is he going to respond?)... although she/he makes some good points. Especially, about how it's not "six degrees of separation"... more like "if you really want to connect to someone, and if it's possible, it can probably be done in an average of six degrees of separation".

I found the Wellman article to be mostly un-interesting... it's mostly a review article and as is the case with survey courses in higher education, you get a taste of the subject but not enough to illustrate what people who do this stuff find so interesting to make it a career. Posted by joebeone at Marzo 16, 2004 03:08 PM