Visualising Virtual Communities: From Erd\H{o}s to the Arts

TL;DR

This paper explores the visualization of virtual communities across various fields, extending concepts like Erdős numbers to arts, and discusses the potential of visual tools to analyze collaborative networks.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of visualizing and analyzing collaborative links in arts fields, inspired by mathematical and scientific community metrics like Erdős numbers.

Findings

Visualisation tools can effectively represent community connections.

Erdős-like metrics can be adapted to arts and other fields.

Potential for new insights into interdisciplinary collaborations.

Abstract

Monitoring communities has become increasingly easy on the web as the number of visualisation tools and amount of data available about communities increase. It is possible to visualise connections on social and professional networks such as Facebook in the form of mathematical graphs. It is also possible to visualise connections between authors of papers. In particular, Microsoft Academic Search now has a large corpus of information on publications, together with author and citation information, that can be visualised in a number of ways. In mathematical circles, the concept of the "Erd\H{o}s number" has been introduced, in honour of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erd\H{o}s, measuring the "collaborative distance" of a person away from Erd\H{o}s through links by co-author. Similar metrics have been proposed in other fields, including acting. The possibility of exploring and visualising such links in arts fields is proposed in this paper.