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Mapping the Bubble: Students Exploring Networks and Mapping the Bubble: Students Exploring Networks and Other Emergent Phenomenon: Other Emergent Phenomenon: Jordi Comas, Assistant Professor of Management My Research Interests Networks • A network is a set of nodes (people, groups, firms) and a set of relationships among those nodes. • Network research is fundamentally relational: the relations among nodes are the focus. • Network research is scalable: we can zoom in and out across levels of analysis Evolution and Emergence of Socioeconomic Institutions • As much as dynamics of networks, my research trajectory is about how dynamics on networks matter, about how networks are the substrate or the venue for purposeful action. Student Project 1: Mapping the Bucknell Bubble • Students start by mapping their own local egocentric network of friends. • The analyze this network and use that analysis to deductively and inductively analyze a larger network constructed from their individual egocentric networks. Student Project 2: A New Kind of Bubble: Exploring Second Life • Second Life is a persistent, 3-D, interactive world where all the content is all user-generated. • At any given moment there are about 35-50 thousand users in SL. • If you read cyberpunk fiction, this is the metaverse (Neuromancer and Snow Crash). The nerds went and built it. • Students are “deputized ethnographers” who will interact with SL and develop slide presentations about what they find in terms of how commerce and culture are evolving in SL. Scholarship-Teaching Links? • Students as subjects and objects: The process of making themselves and their social dynamics the object of study promotes the critical self-awareness of a liberal arts education. • Keeps my skills fresh: The need to explain to eager amateurs deepens my understanding of tools. • Evolving Research Interests : I didn’t start off interested in technology and synthetic worlds. Using Facebook and Second Life as teaching venues led me to new research. Pros and Cons Figure 1: Sample Student Egocentric Network; Color is dorm, circle is female, size is class year (senior is biggest). N=49 Figure 2: Student Network from Egocentric Networks. Color is Dorm. Size is Freeman Betweenness Centrality. N=430 Pros • Students are engaged • They experience the messiness of original research • They understand the importance of research design • The allure of the current Cons • Peculiar to my research interests • They fail to make the leap to objective knowledge • They see me as fallible • I can’t control content… X material in an R setting.
