Presentation for the Society of American Archaeology 2011 Annual Meeting session on 'Blogging Archaeology"

1. Signal versus Noise Why Academic Blogging Matters: A structural argument Shawn Graham, RPA Department of History, Carleton University @electricarchaeo Image CC Paul Keller

2. Omniadisce; posteavidebisnihilessesuperfluum Father Leonard Boyle, http://www.pims.ca/academics/boyle.html Hugh of St Victor teaching three monks From De ArcaMorali (13th Century) Ms. Laud. Misc. 409, f° 3v. The Bodeleian Library, Oxford

3. Size of the Internet Carpenter, Brian. Observed Relationships between Size Measures of the Internet or Is the Internet really just a star network after all? 6.

4. Wayback Machine, Showing Yahoo on October 20 1996

5. Pagerank, according to Wikipedia Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it; the link it has is of a much higher value. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

6. Needle in a Haystack,the finding thereof. Image cc Graham Horn

7. Teaching the Machine Image CC Derrick Bostrom

8. Segal, David. 2010 ‘A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web’. The New York Times, Nov. 26.

9. Understanding our signals The web of responses to Colleen’s Week 2 of the ‘Blogging Archaeology’ carnival

10. Noise Results of search, ‘Blogging Archaeology’ on Google.com (not a phrase-search), April 1 2010. After 20 minutes, nodes=8532, edges=8949

11. Network stats: Diameter: 8 Average Path Length: 3 Filter the network so that only nodes with > 30 connections appear, reduces the graph to ~1.5 % of the nodes, and 10% of all the connections Leaves us with 4 communities, per modularity detection.

12. Signal The archaeological blogosphere: green The cloud: light blue (Google, Amazon, Youtube,) Social Media: Purple (Facebook, Twitter; also online newspapers) News aggregators: Red (news.google.com) Turns out, Colleen is the center of the world. Size of node = betweeness centrality

13. “Roman Archaeology” on the internet

14. Network Stats Diameter: 10 Average Path Length: 6 Filter the network so that only nodes with > 30 connections appear, reduces the graph to ~3 % of the nodes, and 23% of all the connections Leaves us with 9 communities, per modularity detection. Results of search, “Roman Archaeology” on Google.com, April 1 2010. After 20 minutes, nodes=6240, edges=13 216

15. Signal. Academia Blogs & Twitter Wikipedia Google & News sites Size of node = betweeness centrality

16. Reference links Carpenter, Brian. 2010. Observed Relationships between Size Measures of the Internet or Is the Internet really just a star network after all?. http://bit.ly/dUjL89 [April 1 2010] Gephi.org. 2010. Gephi, an open source graph visualization and manipulation software. http://gephi.org [April 1 2010] Jacomy, M. P. Girard, A. Delanoe. Navicrawler 1.7.3http://bit.ly/eUqTuR [April 1 2010] “Leonard Boyle” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Boyle [April 1 2010] Levy, Steve. 2010. ‘How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web’ Wired March. http://bit.ly/9Pg9W8 [April 1 2010] Segal, David. 2010 ‘A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web’. The New York Times, Nov. 26. http://nyti.ms/hR7Iqy [April 1 2010] Singhal, Amit. 2010 .“Official Google Blog: Being bad to your customers is bad for business” Dec. 1. http://bit.ly/hsoRaX [April 1 2010] “PageRank” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank [April 1 2010]