Networks

today, we learned about networks and network theories.

Each of these terms is interdisciplinary meaning that each is

relevant to different scholarly academic disciplines.

And each of these terms can be used in different

kinds of research to.

So at key terms today all involve different kinds of

connection and community will be talking about neural networks, social

networks combined shaft and gazelle shaft, socio graham's strong bonds

and weak ties and speech and discourse communities.

So we'll start with their own networks.

This term is relatively broad and flexible in part because

it's used by a number of different disciplines.

Generally speaking though, it refers to the network structure that

we use to model the brains operations and then by

extension, we also use these similar models to understand artificial

networks. So in a sense, the network structure that allows

neurons to communicate as you can see here has also

become a broader model for understanding how other kinds of

communications work from the Internet and public transit transit to

voting and viruses.

When we talk about social networks, we tend to distinguish

them according to their ties or bonds.

For example, about a century ago sociologists began to use

the terms combined shaft and gazelle shaft to distinguish between

community On the one hand, which is made up of

more personal or direct ties and society on the other

hand, which is made up of more impersonal ties.

When we study and document these kinds of ties or

links, we often use diagrams.

This is a soc a gram of a second grade

classroom where you can see the teacher represented in the

larger circle and the social ties of the Children in

the smaller circles.

This particular socio graham makes use of color coding in

different arrow symbols to classify the ties and bonds of

the classroom.

When we apply this kind of scholarship to literature, we

often use diagrams as well.

In the last two decades, especially this kind of research

has become immensely popular in part because of the digital

texts and tools were able to use now.

So here's an example of a socio gram of a

novel by Charles dickens.

This particular diagram organizes characters according to social class in

geography and maps their ties and bonds within and across

these different worlds.

So related to this kind of work in the 1970s,

a researcher named Mark Granna better published this article on

strong bonds and weak ties and this one study has

inspired a huge amount of research and discussion over the

subsequent decades.

Strong bonds are those personal and direct connections that we

have with family, friends, co workers, people we know by

name and with whom we share some kind of history

or values or purpose weak ties on the other hand,

are those connections that are not so formal?

Maybe they are the people you recognize each day when

you take the bus to campus but whose names you

don't know or maybe the driver of that bus or

the person who you buy coffee from on monday mornings.

In other words, these individual ties might not seem that

important to you, but collectively, in fact they are quite

important. In fact, research tells us that these weak ties

have a lot to do with our sense of well

being in our connectedness to our wider community.

So now we're going to turn towards some of the

networks that affect our language and communication.

And here I'd like to distinguish between speech communities on

the one hand and discourse communities on the other, which

will learn about in the next slide, we'll start with

speech communities.

Each of you has at least one speech community and

probably several.

A speech community is a group of people who share

language dialect and or speech characteristics because of regional or

cultural proximity.

Each region of the United States for example has its

own distinctive speech patterns and accents.

If you grow up in Los Angeles and you travel

to boston, you'll quickly notice a dramatic change in speech

community. But within these regions there are smaller and more

specialist speech communities.

So within the city of boston there are many specific

styles of accent and distinctive vocabularies.

I noticed speech communities myself when I first moved to

Minnesota and I had a lot to learn.

I immediately noticed the long oh in Minnesota and shifts

in vocabulary as well, for instance, the Children here learn

a game called duck duck gray duck as I understand

it instead of what I grew up with on the

West Coast, which was Duck, Duck goose.

These examples are called speech norms.

Their implicit, their unstated, but in many cases a community

is sort of bonded by the fact that everyone seems

to know these speech norms.

Um so I'm going to share with you next, a

very popular quiz created by the new york times a

number of years ago, It asks only 25 questions and

for many people it can identify with eerie accuracy, your

geographical or regional background, just depending on these speech norms

that you may share with that background.

So for me when I took this quiz, the result

was accurate down to the specific county I grew up

in as a child.

So next step we'll learn about discourse communities and these

discourse communities are not regional and that's really important.

Instead of discourse community might have a shared knowledge base,

a specific forums such as a message board or a

cluster of hashtags or social media.

Within this forum, there might be specific genres, which means

specific styles of writing that that community uses.

And finally, discourse community usually has a shared on specialist

language also known as Alexis or a kind of group

vocabulary examples of discourse communities could include bird watchers, people

who have never met in person, but could strike up

a chat on twitter and immediately enjoy a shared vocabulary

and shared interests.

Another example might be groups of fans of a certain

team or a certain sport who can easily chat without

knowing each other because they have a shared and specialist

knowledge base.

For example if I join a random message board online

that's devoted to mandolin music I can probably join in

pretty easily because I share a certain knowledge and Alexis

or a specific vocabulary.

So these people in the group, even if I've never

met them they're already part of this discourse community and

so am I.

So I encourage you to think about your own discourse

communities. You probably have many of them some of them

more formalized in your mind like maybe you're part of

a club or named community and some of them highly

informal. Maybe you've always followed a certain T.

V. Show and you know it's characters inside and out.

Each of these discourse communities has its own specific knowledge

based vocabulary and even speech genres or writing genres.

You also have at least when speech community possibly based

on where you spent your childhood or the way that

your family and friends speak.

It can be interesting to think about when you first

became aware of your speech norms.

Many people aren't really aware of their speech community until

they leave it for the first time and they interact

with other people.

For example some people go away to summer camp as

a teenager or arrive at university for the first time

and suddenly in a new social space surrounded by people

from different speech communities to suddenly become very much aware

of their own speech patterns.

As a way of concluding, I want you to think

about how network theory and modeling has very real repercussions

for contemporary culture and even contemporary politics.

Consider the covid 19 pandemic and the role of contact

tracing or the formation of covid bubbles In 2020 I

would argue that the pandemic has made each of us

much more aware about our own socio graham, the strong

bonds and weak ties that we have with others and

what those mean for contagion and our safety, our personal

safety and also the safety of the community.

Another example is the 2020 presidential election.

When network theory again played a political role in what

was called relational organizing.

We saw how fake news and information literacy each depend

quite a bit on the networks of social media.

So these networks absolutely shape our culture and our daily

lives in crucial ways.

Networks

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