From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t1n20rynvsqvbk0g14g8pth0vlnbl1yd
“Human Trails In Cyberspace
Social scientists create maps of online interactions
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Philadelphia
If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?
That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager
to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.
Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and
interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on
computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on
human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal
patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the
act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints
in the sand….
