Network Clustering: Rob Cross and Kathleen Carley

Next Monday, Sept 8, begins the 2-day Network Roundtable Fall Conference. Rob Cross at UVA has led the Network Roundtable from its inception. He and his colleagues have quite an agenda planned for their time in DC.

My regular readers with sharp eyes may have noticed Rob Cross in a recent post of mine. That post introduced network clustering with an example --- a WWW clustering analysis of "organizational network analysis" computed by Grokker:

One of my favorite metaphors for clustering analysis is the table of contents. It is useful for seeing the big picture, all-inclusively, broken down into sub-categories. In an organizational network setting, a natural application would be identifying communities of practice (including those that don't yet recognize themselves as such).

Continuing with the book metaphor, we can see that the WWW authors of organizational network analysis have devoted "chapters" to these topics:

1. Social networks
2. Organizational systems
3. Public health
4. Information management
5. Knowledge
6. Tools
7. Rob Cross
8. Kathleen M Carley
9. Other

Most of these "chapters" are based on fields or methods of work. Two "chapters" stand out for being based on individual people.

Another way to view these "book chapters" is as "closed networks" (relatively speaking), as I described in my last post. I refer my readers again to that post, this time keeping Rob Cross and Kathleen Carley in mind. It's fun to speculate how the Cross and Carley camps employ stereotypes to describe their counterparts.

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