ALBERTO PEPE

An in-depth longitudinal analysis of assortative mixing patterns

Title: Collaboration in sensor network research: an in-depth longitudinal analysis of assortative mixing patterns

Venue: Scientometrics. Volume 84, Number 3. September, 2010

Abstract: Many investigations of scientific collaboration are based on statistical analyses of large networks constructed from bibliographic repositories. These investigations often rely on a wealth of bibliographic data, but very little or no other information about the individuals in the network, and thus, fail to illustrate the broader social and academic landscape in which collaboration takes place. In this article, we perform an in-depth longitudinal analysis of a relatively small network of scientific collaboration (N = 291) constructed from the bibliographic record of a research centerin the development and application of wireless and sensor network technologies. We perform a preliminary analysis of selected structural properties of the network, computing its range, configuration and topology. We then support our preliminary statistical analysis with an in-depth temporal investigation of the assortative mixing of selected node characteristics, unveiling the researchers’ propensity to collaborate preferentially with others with a similar academic profile. Our qualitative analysis of mixing patterns offers clues as to the nature of the scientific community being modeled in relation to its organizational, disciplinary, institutional, and international arrangements of collaboration.

chase

Chase is an installation by Liz Magic Laser on display at Derek Eller Gallery (615 West 27th Street, New York) from May 21 to June 26, 2010. With chase, Liz Magic Laser reinterprets Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play Man equals Man. The project includes a feature-length video, an installation of ephemera from the production of chase as well as a theatrical set that serves as a backdrop for a live performance.

Working in collaboration with nine actors, Laser staged Brecht’s play in the ATM vestibules of banks throughout New York City. Videotaping each actor’s performance separately, she edited the scenes, creating a complete version of the narrative. The element of estrangement in the original play is heightened through jump cuts and spatiotemporal shifts. 

I was fortunate to be part of this project (in a very small way)! Inspired by a paper I wrote on the non-placeness of airports, Spencer Wolff and Liz Magic Laser asked me some questions about non-places. The text of the interview is on display at the Derek Eller Gallery and is reprinted below. 

***

A Skype discussion between Alberto Pepe Gentile of UCLA, Department of Information Science, and Spencer Wolff of Yale University, Department of Comparative Literature. 

Interviewer: Hi? It’s Spencer from Yale. Can you hear me? 

Dr. Gentile: Yes? 

Interviewer: Is your camera working? I can’t see you. 

Dr. Gentile: I can see you.

Interviewer: That’s weird. There’s no video on my screen. Hold on….hmmm….it’s not working. Ok, let’s just get started with the interview.

Dr. Gentile: Fine with me. 

Interviewer: So, I’ve rung you on Skype, to interview you about your work on Non-places. Can you define a Non-place? What is it?

Dr. Gentile: Non-place is a term originally coined by the French Anthropologist Marc Augé. Non-places are unlived transient arenas that resist any sort of subjective, emotional attachment: motorways, airports, bank vestibules, elevators…etc.

Interviewer: What’s so special about them? 

Dr. Gentile: Well, many things. For one, they do not incite any sense of belonging. They are places of dual spectatorship and spectacle, and, as result, Non-places disrupt our traditional assumptions about comportment, posture, proxemics…

Interviewer: Proxemics? 

Dr. Gentile: Proxemics are culturally determined relations of space, what you could call the body-space that people maintain between themselves while they interact. For instance individuals from Nordic cultures prefer greater interpersonal distances than those from Latin cultures.

Interviewer: So it’s about how much space we give each other in the street?

Dr. Gentile: Well, proxemics are universally applicable to all sorts of space. In the U.S., Edward Hall conducted a wonderful study in men’s urinals where he showed that if there are five urinals men will evenly space themselves at urinals 1,3 5, in order to maintain distance. If there are men at urinals 1 and 3 and a tester comes in and situates himself at urinal number 2, both men get visibly upset and sometimes become aggressive. 

Interviewer:  That’s happened to me before. 

Dr. Gentile: Or in an elevator, if you notice, no matter how many people are inside, they will space themselves according to predictable, iterative patterns using verbal and bodily cues: an unspoken elevator etiquette. There’s another experiment that I’ve always been fond of. I think it was done at Stanford, but they placed an experimenter in an elevator facing the back wall and videotaped the results. So the door opens and there’s an empty elevator with this guy in there whose face you cannot see. 

Interviewer: What happened?

Dr. Gentile: No one would get into the elevator.

Interviewer: Honestly it sounds kind of spooky.

Dr. Gentile: Well that’s the nature of Non-places. Haunted houses were once “places” that became Non-places. Lived places come with a grammar, a script, if you will, of how to act. But when you enter an abandoned house you’re not quite sure how to behave and that’s frightening. Have you noticed how all haunted houses look alike to some degree?

Interviewer: Sure

Dr. Gentle: This is characteristic of Non-places, flatness, sameness, aseptic uniformity. Most Non-places are supermodern. They are devoted to the anonymous processing of goods, people, services, and money.  Also, these processing mechanisms have to be happen fast. The best and most efficient airports, for example, are those in which you spend as little time as possible. Fluidity and speed, in turn, are attained by control and mechanization. This is heightened, in airports or ATM vestibules, by the sense of being surveyed and managed by video cameras. For this reason, in Non-places we rely particularly heavily on verbal or visual cues from others, what you might call embodied instruction. We’re a little out to sea, unsure what play to perform, so in that sense Non-places are ideal sites for revolutionary action.

Interviewer: How so?

Dr. Gentile: The Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that all societies wanting to make a ‘new man’ should approach this task through processes of deculturation and reculturation focused on bodily practices. That’s why revolutionaries place such a heavy emphasis on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners. If I remember correctly, Bourdieu said something along the lines of, “revolutionaries entrust to the body in abbreviated and practical, so mnemonic form, the arbitrary content of the culture.” If you want to give birth to a “new man” the best thing to do is to destabilize a person’s given identity, and then endow that person with a new performative.

Interviewer: Maybe you should define a performative for the reader. 

Dr. Gentile: Performatives, in J.L. Austin’s and especially Judith Butler’s work, are these pre-scripted identities or roles that I’ve been talking about. Think of Sartre’s waiter in Being and Nothingness who plays at being at waiter instead of just being one. He’s enacting a performative. His waiter is determined by a particular theatrical staging, a “place”: the French café. Places, lived arenas, like a café, as opposed to an elevator, are already outfitted with embodied and discursive grammars. That’s why it’s hard to reprogram someone in a “place.” Imagine walking into a posh restaurant.  First you look at all the props and staging, the mise en scene, and then you look at the people who are holding themselves in a certain way and you try to “act on your best behavior.” If you walk into a café there is a different staging and you know you can behave differently. Perhaps when you were a child and you walked into a nice restaurant for the first time, you were unsure how to act, but by the time you’ve become an adult you’ve already memorized your lines. 

Interviewer: So the whole world’s a stage?

Dr. Gentile: No. Only parts of it. Though we are gradually developing formulaic props and bodily grammars for some Non-places, like airports—for instance taking off your shoes when you go through the metal detectors –elevators, urinals, etc. aren’t similarly equipped. Imagine walking into a fancy restaurant, le cirque, and a man is standing with his nose pressed against a pillar at the center of the restaurant. That would not be spooky like in the elevator; it would be ridiculous. The man would be challenged immediately and forced to leave. But in the elevator you don’t know how to act, you don’t know your lines, so not a single person challenged the experimenter with his back to the door. People were just frightened and refused to go in. This is why Al Qaeda situates its training camps in remote and unfamiliar locations, and by the same token, when a government wants to reprogram someone, say using torture and brainwashing, they do the same, Guantanamo for example. In Non-places we are vulnerable because our scripts, our habitual performatives are unreliable if not useless. 

Interviewer: So if you get someone into a Non-place it’s easier to tell them what to do? 

Dr. Gentile: Not, tell them, but show them. When you want to reprogram someone you rely on positive content, which can only be conveyed through bodily staging. Take a soldier for instance, or a child, the verbal instruction they receive tends to be injunctive: “You’re doing it wrong!” But to teach a soldier how to goose-step, you can’t explain it. We do not even have the vocabulary for that. You have to show it, you have to say watch me do this and imitate me. Get someone into a Non-place and then get them to act like you, and you can mold your ‘new man’ after your heart’s desires. 

Interviewer: So I should really get this Skype camera working so I can see how you’re positioning yourself. 

Dr. Gentile: Be my guest. 

Interviewer:  Hold on, maybe if I fiddle with this wire….shoot. Can you still see me? 

Interviewer: Hello? 

Interviewer: Hey are you there? Hello? Dr. Gentile? Are you there? 

The dilated triple

Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe, Joshua Shinavier

Title: The dilated triple

Venue: Emergent Web Intelligence: Advanced Semantic Technologies, Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing series, pages 3-16, ISBN:978-1-84996-076-2, Springer-Verlag, 2010

Abstract: The basic unit of meaning on the Semantic Web is the RDF statement, or triple, which combines a distinct subject, predicate and object to make a definite assertion about the world. A set of triples constitutes a graph, to which they give a collective meaning. It is upon this simple foundation that the rich, complex knowledge structures of the Semantic Web are built. Yet the very expressiveness of RDF, by inviting comparison with real-world knowledge, highlights a fundamental shortcoming, in that RDF is limited to statements of absolute fact, independent of the context in which a statement is asserted. This is in stark contrast with the thoroughly context-sensitive nature of human thought. The model presented here provides a particularly simple means of contextualizing an RDF triple by associating it with related statements in the same graph. This approach, in combination with a notion of graph similarity, is sufficient to select only those statements from an RDF graph which are subjectively most relevant to the context of the requesting process.

PhD dissertation

I filed my Ph.D. dissertation on May 27, 2010. You can find it on SSRN (Social Science Research Network) at this link (you may have to click on “One-Click Download” to download it as a PDF).

Here are some details.

Title: Structure and Evolution of Scientific Collaboration Networks in a Modern Research Collaboratory 

Abstract: This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a modern, multi-disciplinary, distributed laboratory involved in sensor network research. By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation examines the collaborative ecology of CENS in terms of three networks of interaction: co-authorship of scholarly publications, communication activity on mailing lists, and interpersonal acquaintanceship. This study exposes the topology, structure, and evolution of these networks in relation with the disciplinary and institutional arrangements of CENS. Findings indicate that CENS collaboration networks have fluid, non-cliquish, small-world topologies, and are free of prestige-based mechanisms. Further analysis reveals that structural communities in the co-authorship and acquaintanceship networks overlap considerably. They also exhibit little disciplinary and institutional diversity locally, although CENS becomes more inter-disciplinary over time. Overall, results of the structural and evolutionary analyses point to the importance of interpersonal relationships for accomplishing scientific work in distributed environments.

Keywords: scientific collaboration, collaboratories, cyberinfrastructure, social networks, scientific networks, social complex systems, community structure, assortative mixing, homophily

Suggested Citation: Alberto Pepe, Structure and Evolution of Scientific Collaboration Networks in a Modern Research Collaboratory (May 27, 2010). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1616935

Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1

Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe

Title: Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1: Beyond the Turing Test

Venue: Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, Edinburgh, Scotland. 2009.

Abstract: Since the Turing test was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, the primary goal of artificial intelligence has been predicated on the ability for computers to imitate human behavior. However, the majority of uses for the computer can be said to fall outside the domain of human abilities and it is exactly outside of this domain where computers have demonstrated their greatest contribution to intelligence. Another goal for artificial intelligence is one that is not predicated on human mimicry, but instead, on human amplification. This article surveys various systems that contribute to the advancement of human and social intelligence.

Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of micro-blogging activity

Authors: Alberto Pepe, Sasank Reddy, Lilly Nguyen, Mark Hansen

Title: Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of micro-blogging activity

Venue: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2009

Abstract: Micro-blogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, or tweets. This article explores the temporal component of micro-blogging activity by emphasizing its narrative nature: an individual tweet is an expression of personal online presence at a given time, yet it necessarily embodies the context of a broader developing story. We present Twitflick, a digital media platform that blends a continuous stream of real-time text updates from Twitter with related user-uploaded images hosted on Flickr. Twitflick acts as a space in which distributed, temporally-authentic personal narratives, in the form of photographs and text, reinforce, extend, and even misrepresent each other. The visualizations provided by Twitflick capture the quotidian rhythms of online social exchange and draw attention to the poetic potential of web 2.0.

Political protest Italian-style

Authors: Alberto Pepe, Corinna di Gennaro

Title: Political protest Italian–style: The blogosphere and mainstream media in the promotion and coverage of Beppe Grillo’s V–day

Venue: First Monday.  Volume 14, Number 12. 7 December 2009

Abstract: We analyze the organization, promotion and public perception of “V–day”, a political rally that took place on 8 September 2007, to protest against corruption in the Italian Parliament. Launched by blogger Beppe Grillo, and promoted via a word–of–mouth mobilization on the Italian blogosphere, V–day brought close to one million Italians in the streets on a single day, but was mostly ignored by mainstream media. This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, we analyze the volume and content of online articles published by both bloggers and mainstream news sources from 14 June (the day V–day was announced) until 15 September 2007 (one week after it took place). We find that the success of V–day can be attributed to the coverage of bloggers and small–scale local news outlets only, suggesting a strong grassroots component in the organization of the rally. We also find a dissonant thematic relationship between content published by blogs and mainstream media: while the majority of blogs analyzed promote V–day, major mainstream media sources critique the methods of information production and dissemination employed by Grillo. Based on this finding, in the second part of the study, we explore the role of Grillo in the organization of the rally from a network analysis perspective. We study the interlinking structure of the V–day blogosphere network, to determine its structure, its levels of heterogeneity, and resilience. Our analysis contradicts the hypothesis that Grillo served as a top–down, broadcast–like source of information. Rather, we find that information about V–day was transferred across heterogeneous nodes in a moderately robust and resilient core network of blogs. We speculate that the organization of V–day represents the very first case, in Italian history, of a political demonstration developed and promoted primarily via the use of social media on the Web.