Social Network/ing Week at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto kicked off tonight with a fas­cin­at­ing key­note by Cornell’s Jon Klein­berg. ‘The Geo­graphy of Social and Inform­a­tion Net­works,’ was one of the most fas­cin­at­ing applied math­em­at­ical lec­tures I can say to hav­ing ever atten­ded (and before I go too far I will stress that the math was made very, very approach­able for a layper­son such as myself). His intro­du­cer indic­ated that he inven­ted algorithmic soci­ology and although this soun­ded rather pre­sump­tu­ous (an Al Gore and the Inter­net sort of thing?), I can’t help but be quite will­ing to give this some cre­dence after listen­ing to this present­a­tion.
Klein­berg opened with a quote from Jim Gray, that “the emer­gence of cyber­space and the world wide web was like the dis­cov­ery of a new con­tin­ent.” Klein­berg was quite delib­er­ate in this jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the geo­graphic with the tech­no­lo­gical and he then teased this into a fur­ther merge with the social. But he ques­tioned whether maps are actu­ally an appro­pri­ate meta­phor for some­thing as aphys­ical as social net­works — but chose to let this stand on the need to have some com­mon vocab­u­lary with which to be able to relate. Read the rest of this entry »