Scientific Communication Networks: Tracking Victorian and Twenty-First Century Communication with Social Network Analysis

EasyChair Preprint 8021

Abstract

Communication fosters relationships among scientists, allows for the exchange of ideas and research findings, and creates avenues for scientists to seek and obtain information by formal and informal means. The act of transmitting scientific findings directly to other individuals creates ties among the individuals, regardless of the transmission medium. Letters, tweets, email messages, and posts to a variety of other platforms are all means by which networks of scientific exchange can be created. Scientific work is not placeless; who is involved, where the activity occurs, when research is conducted, and how information is shared matters (Livingston, 2003; 2005). Thus, the communication of scientific information needs to be examined in more than local settings of time and place, even though such study originates in particular places. This paper begins with applying social network analysis methods to gain an understanding of communication patterns in the correspondence records of Edwin Gilpin, a Victorian era government-based scientist employed in a geological and mining engineering position (Duggan & MacDonald, 2008; 2011), which is then compared to the Twitter activity of selected twenty-first scientists in similar employment. The objective is to demonstrate that social network analysis methodology can uncover prominent characteristics of communication networks in both periods.

Keyphrases: Twitter, correspondence networks, scholarly networks, scientific communication

@booklet{EasyChair:8021,
  author    = {Bertrum MacDonald and Anatoliy Gruzd and Valerie Collins},
  title     = {Scientific Communication Networks: Tracking Victorian and Twenty-First Century Communication with Social Network Analysis},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8021},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}