If justice and righteousness perish, human life would no longer have any value in the world. by online poker
Two research projects are attempting to validate and extend it into the electronic world of email communications.
Duncan J. Watts, Peter Dodds, and Roby Muhamaddirect the Small World Project at Columbia University, which aims to
"to perform the first large scale, global verification of the small world hypothesis, using the modern Email equivalent of Milgram's passport innovation. We hope to test not only average properties of lengths of acquaintance chains, but also the distribution of lengths, along with the effect of race, class, nationality, occupation, and education. We intend to quantify the impact of additional target information upon search success and chain length, and also to investigate the importance of "centers" individuals who are thought to exist who are disproportionately responsible for directing messages to the targets."
"seeks to map the social connections among people using email. Using the tools of social network analysis, we hope to construct the first images of the social topography (as opposed to the technical or physical topography) of the Internet. This social map will help us understand how information moves through society, how different types of people are connected, and how small the social world in which we live really is."
The OSU project has finished its data collection, and is in the process of analyzing the results. A tantalizign but unsatisying snapshot of participants' locations and the locastions of their correspondents is here. Preliminary resutls of the Columbia projects were published in Science, although it is also ongoing and visitors are invited to sign up and start a new chain.
Mapping communication chains is a valuable goal and both projects link to the expected resources on complex interactive networks, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, etc., but here are some projects that imaginatively project from the idea of six degrees of separation. Do you know of others?
