After a long hiatus, I've finally been able to find time to get back into my SNA work. I completed my preliminary data entry last month, which involved inputting information for all poets affiliated with the poetry journal "Gakko" and the number of contributions each made to modernist poetry journals between 1920 and 1944. Today, my primary goal was to input the data into some SNA analysis tools and see if I could produce a two-mode graph in which links are weighted according to number of contributions made to a particular journal. I was able to do this quite easily in ORA, which then allowed me to produce a predictably messy graph. But what I was really keen to try out was to load the weighted data into UCINET so as to pull apart the affiliation network and see how the poets are connected to one another through the journals. This proved more difficult than I had thought, as ORA couldn't output to UCINET format. Without this step, I will likely have to input the weights manually in UCINET and go from there.
Beyond such technical details, the broader problem that I need to begin addressing is what I'm going to be able to do at the analytical stage that will reveal anything interesting. Part of the problem is learning what sort of analytical algorithms are possible and sensible given the structure of the underlying data. The other part of the problem is coming up with the right questions to ask about the data. Is it centrality measures that I am most interested in? Am I looking for clusters within the network? Do I want to create a kind of network DNA fingerprint for each poet to see how the participation of each does or does not align with others? I guess what I need to really think about are the questions that can't be answered when one has just individual data. Or even if the results do point to realities that would seem obvious to anyone familiar with the poet, the point is to look at the results in aggregate and consider what they might be able to tell us about the modern field of poetic production seen from a broader scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment