Social Networks and Dynamics
Social Networks and Evolution

69740 Sociol 229/Anthro 289A/Social Sciences 249A
Fall 2005 (Syllabus in continual redevelopment tailored to students)
SSPB 2296 2:00-4:50 Thursday

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Week 9 (Thurs) - THanksgivingHoliday

You should own Exploratory Network Analysis with Pajek and get the downloadable data files that go with each chapter Together these constitute a network analysis practicum. Recommended: From Words to Numbers : Narrative, Data, and Social Science (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) (Paperback) by Roberto Franzosi, 2004 Generalized Blockmodeling (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) (Hardcover) Patrick Doreian, Vladimir Batagelj, Anuska Ferligoj complete access to drw pdfs Students in this seminar are from GSM, Sociology, Political Science, Economics, DASA, MBS, ICS, and Anthropology. Sociology students may want to consult the Social Network Field Exam Reading List. The Social Dynamics and Evolution Group that sponsors this seminar is also linked to the four-campus Human Sciences and Complexity program that meets every other friday starting Sept 30 and to which you are all invited. The readings are not static: they will be adjusted to the needs and interests of the seminar participants. Partial Syllabus Networks and Social Dynamics/Evolution Anthro 289A/Social Sciences 249A Fall 2005 (preliminary) Professor Doug White Each week, selected students will present discuss the material of the week's readings.  It is expected that students will do more than summarize the reading and challenge some aspects of the readings from methodological and/or theoretical perspectives.  The overall objective of this section of the course is to advance the development of theory and method for understanding the internal dynamics of social formations.  For questions: drwhite@uci.edu One fundamental set of concepts you will need to review is the theory of relations as formal properties eJournal Readings: First Cities - Algaze Population and Conflict Dynamics - Turchin Time series methods - Turchin Network Dynamics of Small Groups - Kadushin Emergence of Institutions - Jost see also: Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy Avner Greif 2005, Stanford and: Civilizations as dynamic networks: Cities, hinterlands, populations, industries, trade and conflict" drw powerpoint for Videoconference and Plenary Session What is this seminar about? The subject is how (kinematics) and why things change (dynamics) or evolve. The simplest modeling approach is to pick a limited number of clear variables and processes and investigate how they interact. Experiment, observation, analysis of time-series data, simulation, and mathematical modeling are among the tools we use. Networks are crucial because they provide a representational context for interaction. Typically the simpler mathematical models and simulations do not show a very good fit to observation or analysis of time-series. They are largely suggestive, provide baselines for comparison, and serve to clarify how to look and measure the phenomena studied. The principle of sufficient statistics is interesting in this regard: how much of the detail in the data is irrelevant to the dynamics? Note how Turchin does the analysis of dynamics as between demography and sociopolitical conflict by ignoring birth death and migration and taking the population number at the variable that has the main time series interactions. Time-series analysis can be very tricky, but if we look at the people from UCSD who won the Nobel prize in this area on stock market behavior, they focused on how movements and patterns in movements (rise and fall: the 'arch' pattern) relate to variance (volatility) and they picked up how human behavior with respect to risk and perceived opportunity created some of these patterns. In the eJrnl articles we will read the first week, fortunately, Turchin gives us a primer on these methods, and you may want to go to some of the works he references if you want to use these methods. In my own work, currently, I am taking the principles of sufficient statistics, modeling, and time-series, network and scaling analysis in combination to construct a series of models, so as to develop multi-level explanations for processes that we observe historically in the problem of 'Civilizations as Dynamic Networks.' The focus is on one 'outcome' time series: rise and fall of city network economies. The models start from the simplest one, and the first part of the analysis evaluates its explanatory adequacy. The second part, if there are major gaps, is to identify the next simplest overlay model (a combination of two or more models) that accounts for the most 'variance' so to speak, or systemic behavior. If we are looking at any substantive problem for which there are data (a) through time and (b) hopefully, not only entities that have attributes or measurable variables, but (c) interactions that we can code as networks, the analytic problem is to take some focus, some outcome or dependent variable or variables, and try to figure out what is a reasonable context or system in which the interactions that produce the outcome(s) are in some way regular and accountable by a model of endogenous regularities in which interaction among entities and variables (including network variables) will go on producing this regularity, which may include the possibility of some kind(s) of transformation occurring as a result, or some kind of partially predictable oscillations, etcetera. Parameter-fitting of models and testing on independent samples will be considered. To illustrate, I am going to review some of the problems of dynamical network modeling under the heading of some large-scale processes (under the topics following), and some of the readings will cover examples in these areas: Some large-scale topics: Population dynamics - trends and oscillations Population and Conflict Dynamics - Turchin Cities - Scaling hierarchies - Problems with Fitting to the Power-Law Distribution (or q-exponential) Michel L. Goldstein, Steven A. Morris, and Gary G. Yen City dynamics - Cities and Complexity - ?? Hegemony - Political and Economic Industries - Network Sequences and Foreign Investment David Stark and Balazs Vedres Polities Parties (e.g., Analyzing the US Senate in 2003) External War Week One, 1: Network Economics and Evolutionary Trajectories (choose one on the list above to read, review, present) Alternates: Week One, 2:  Intra-species interaction   Inter-species interaction Tim Ingold: Predation and Protection (30 pages) Alan Rogers: Resources and population dynamics  (27 pages) Week Two, 1:  Intra-species interaction Robert L. Trivers:  Sexual selection and parental investment (48 pages) Ch 7, Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man 1871-1971 Ed. Bernard Campbell Bell & Song: Sacrificing reproductive success (10 pages) Week Two, 2: Dynamics of Population  Turchin: Chapters Two, Three and  Four (68 pages) An Exponentialist homepage David Coutts (11 pages) Korotayev, Malkov, and White: (More is Simpler -) A Compact Macromodel of World Population Growth (11 pages) Population Dynamics and Warfare: preprint Turchin and Korotayev; Addendum; Supplementary Turchin's nature article Demo software for dynamic plots from excel, spss NonLinear Time Series Modeling NLTSM screen (very easy to use) example of phaseplot in xls Presenting Turchin's Chapter 3 Gabe Lawson Critique of the critique Chapter4 Critique of the Nature review of Turchin Presenting Turchin's Chapter 6 Jennifer Chandler An Arrighian view correlated with Fischer Jennifer's question of "language of domination" in the Arrighian hegemons Peter Turchin Dynamical Analysis of Socio-Economic Oscillations: England, 1100-1900 Week Three, 1:  Dynamics of Wealth Accumulation Bell: Wealth, Power & Corp. Groups (40 pages) Korotayev: World Religions (40 pages) (see also book manuscript Bell: Bands, fertility and the social organization of early humans (21 pages, doc file) Fredrik Barth: Nomads of South Persia (32 pages) Week Three, 2: Social structure and demographic processes Bell: A new model of Middle Eastern Social Structures.(34 pages) White and Houseman: The Navigability of Strong Ties: Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology; Another model of Middle Eastern Social Structures.(10 pages) 2003 Douglas R. White, Emergence, transformation and decay in pastoral nomad socio-natural systems. to appear in Emergence, Transformation and Decay in Socio-Natural Systems, edited by Sander van der Leeuw, Uno Svedin, Tim Kohler, and Dwight Read. 1998 Michael Houseman and Douglas R. White, Network Mediation of Exchange Structures: Ambilateral Sidedness and Property Flows in Pul Eliya. Kinship, Networks and Exchange, Chapter 4, pp. 58-88. Edited by Thomas Schweizer and Douglas R. White. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Week Four, 1: Social structure and demographic processes in early China HISTORICAL POPULATION DYNAMICS: A MODEL OF PRE-INDUSTRIAL DEMOGRAPHIC CYCLE Komarova and Korotayev Korotayev and Komarova: A new model of Chinese dynastic cycles (40 pages) Rethinking the Hobbesian Metaphor for International Politics - Comparing Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (31 pages) Jack A. Goldstone: Chapter 4, State Breakdown in Early Modern Asia: The Ottoman Crisis and the Ming-Qing Transition (66 pages) - from the book Revolution and Rebellion in the Modern World Supplementary: Mark Edward Lewis:  Sanctioned Violence in Early China. (39 pages) C. Martin Wilbur:  Slavery in China During the Former Han Dynasty (33 pages) Week Four, 2: General Models of Network Evolution 2004 Douglas R. White, Walter W. Powell, Jason Owen-Smith and James Moody. Networks, Fields and Organizations: Micro-Dynamics, Scale and Cohesive Embeddings. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 10:95-117. Special issue on Mathematical Representations for the Analysis of Social Networks within and between Organizations. 1977 Douglas R. White, Michael L. Burton, and Lilyan A. Brudner, Entailment Theory and Method: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Sexual Division of Labor. Behavior Science Research 12:1-249. download data from spss excel James G. March, 1991 " Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," Organization Science 2 71-87. JSTOR Week Five: Edge-Based Modeling (EBM) and Network Evolution of Civilizations A generative model for feedback networks, In Press, Physical Review E White, Kejzar, Tsallis, Farmer and White: (8 pages), with simulations Stuart Kauffman's NK Boolean Networks (2 pages) White and Spufford: From Medieval to Modern (4 pages), with slides, GIS and SVG network images John F. Padgett, Christopher K. Ansell, Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434 American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98, No. 6. (May, 1993), pp. 1259-1319. Brudner, Lilyan A., and Douglas R. White. 1997. Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories Theory and Society 25:161-208. White, Douglas R. 2005. Ring Cohesion in Marriage and Social Networks Forthcoming: Social Networks special issue edited by Alain Degenne Mathematiques, informatique, et sciences humaines Journal of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris Download:RingCohesionMarriage.pdf Hamberger, Klaus, Michael Houseman, Elizabeth Daillant, Douglas R. White and Laurent Barry. 2005 Matrimonial ring structures Forthcoming: Social Networks special issue edited by Alain Degenne Mathematiques, informatique, et sciences humaines Journal of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris Download: MatrimonialRingStructure.pdf Tools for Marriage Network Analysis Week Six: Discussion papers on early Chinese demographic processes Additional: Chiefdoms into States Boehm, Christopher. 1993. Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 227-254. See also (for blood feud as self-regulation) Exposing the Moral Self in Montenegro: The Use of Natural Definitions to Keep Ethnography Descriptive Christopher Boehm American Ethnologist, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Feb., 1980), pp. 1-26. Wright, Henry. From Chiefdoms to Origins of States and Civilizations Role Interlock Nadel, S.F. Social Structure. Chapter on the Coherence of Roles White et al. 2004. Adding Higher-Order Interactions to Network Ontology Transformations of Structure Denham and White Balasz, Socialism to Capitalism in Hungary Bearman, Social Movements Micro Behavior and Macro Structure White, Networks, Ethnography and Emergence Network Evolution in the Industrial Economy 2005 Walter W. Powell, Douglas R. White, Kenneth W. Koput and Jason Owen-Smith. Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences. easiest to read!: American Journal of Sociology 110(4, January):1132-1205 electronic edition Download: SFI-WP2003d.pdf See link to movies at Barabasi site 2005 Jason Owen-Smith, Walter W. Powell, and Douglas R. White. Network Growth and Consolidation: The Effects of Cohesion and Diversity on the Biotechnology Industry Network Submitted Forthcoming in Management Science , Special issue on Complex Systems Across Disciplines. Download: Growth_andConsolidation.pdf 1988 Large-Scale Network of World Economy: Social scientists use the CRAY Interview: Douglas R. White, David A. Smith. Science at the San Diego Supercomputer Center 1987: 27-28 Macrocultural Evolution and Networks Korotayev - world religions and social structure

Gray Langur

On-line Resources:

Networks and Complexity: Special Issue (see Intro, Social Insects, Brain, Small Worlds, History, Civilizations, Markets)

Fractal Properties of Growing Networks source: Networked Nation by Sid Karen

Theme 1 - Social Network Analysis: A Handbook by John Scott

Theme 1 - Nexus: The Groundbreaking Science of Networks Mark BuchananAmazon Price: $18.17

Theme 2 - Self-Organized Systems (SOC) How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality - Per Bak. ISBN: 038798738X Amazon: $18.00

Theme 3 - Simulations of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World by Stefan Helmreich For hands-on simulation experience, Download Starlogo from the MIT media lab (PC and Mac)
Readings by the author of Starlogo: first chapter, pp. 3-19 (on decentralization): Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) - Mitchel Resnick; 1997. Paperback MIT PRESS. ISBN: 0262680939 Usually ships in 2-3 days - Amazon Price: $12.50.

Theme 3 - Simulations - Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Complex Adaptive Systems) - Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell; 1996. Paperback Usually ships 24 hours - Amazon Price: $20.00.

On-line: We will be using Pajek freeware for network analyis, reading chapters in the Explorarory Social Network Analysis book about using Pajek, and using the downloadable data files provided with that book. To download, Right click each set of chapter datafiles listed here to SAVE to the directory you select at home or school, but first make subdirectories Ch2, Ch3 etc so each self-extracts to a separate subdirectory and you can find them by chapter. Once saved you can click on each with windows explored and it will self-extract the files for that chapter: chap2.EXE chap3.EXE chap4.EXE chap5.EXE chap6.EXE chap7.EXE chap8.EXE chap9.EXE chap10.EXE chap11.EXE chap12.EXE Appendix.EXE to accompany Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek, by Wouter de Nooy, and pajek authors Andrej Mrvar, and Vladimir Batagelj -- by installing Pajek at home and unzipping datafiles, you can work through the book, turning in exercises and analyses at the rate of two per week for project credit, including a report on and intensive analysis of a dataset.