The network visualizations on this site come from the participant and session data from the DH11 conference registration system. While every reasonable attempt has been made to disambiguate and reconcile the variety of methods of describing participants and their affiliations, there will naturally be some errors in this data that may be reflected in the visualizations.
Networks were represented using Gephi, a graph visualization and analysis package. Node size is based on undirected Eigenvector centrality and modularity (randomized, 62 communities, .945 modularity) is determined from the algorithm described in: Vincent D Blondel, Jean-Loup Guillaume, Renaud Lambiotte, Etienne Lefebvre, Fast unfolding of communities in large networks, in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2008 (10), P1000.
Centrality and modularity and the use of network representation are meant to spur reflection on the nature of the DH11 conference and academic conferences in general. These are not true claims that the individuals or universities presented on these networks are in some absolute manner more or less "central" or even that they are more or less so in this conference, but rather that they are such within this particular representation of the conference. The same can be said of the recognized communities. By the same vein, such representations cannot simply be dismissed as purely contrived objects. This is a direct representation of the conference as it exists within the database designed to store conference participants, their affiliations and their activities. Such databases permeate modern existence, whether visible or not.
Geographic projection is Mercator which, for all its warts, is the most familiar representation of our world.
Elijah Meeks is the Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford University and will be presenting as part of the DH11 panel Modeling Event-Based Historical Narratives: A Conversation Between Digital Humanists, Information Scientists and Computer Scientists.
This site was created using the website exporter plugin for Gephi.
Computer Science Research Institute Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja
