Gallery Carre
Social Mapping or, Mapping Fucking
May 13th, 2024 by Viviane
In one of my many comments to One Life Take Two’s Program Notes, I commented on Jefferson’s and Dacia’s attempt at the complex diagram that would map out who has had sex with whom.
‘I don’t think ‘tree’ may be the right term. More like those visual maps they’re working on up at the MIT Media Lab.’
This (long-winded) post is penance for my quibbling over the choice of bourbon required for the reconstruction.
A family tree is generally the totality of one’s ancestors, or specifically, a chart used in genealogy to show the family connections between individuals, consisting of the individuals’ names (usually accompanied by dates, and often also places and occupations) connected by various types of line representing marriages, extra-marital unions, and progeniture.
The OLTT community is fluid and changes as I write, which is why I piped up about visual maps. It’s really an attempt to document a social network. A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.
I don’t know about social network theory but I do know about internet social networks like Friendster, MySpace (which Jefferson, Madeline and I are on). There’s a lot of tools that attempt to visualize social networks. Probably the best known is Inflow. In a corporate environment, this software maps and measure teamwork, communication, information flow, and knowledge sharing/re-use. It helps uncover gaps and effective connections.
The Wikipedia article had a list of related topics, including sexual network, which led me to this link at the almost the same moment Colton was commenting on it!:
Researchers map the sexual network of an entire high school
For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.
The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.
Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner.
The paper is Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks (Adobe PDF; no charts).
The chart, The Structure of Romantic and Sexual Relations at “Jefferson High School” is here.
If I read this chart correctly, the Cast of Characters will each require their own bigass circle!
Only tangentially related but nevertheless interesting (to me):
* Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab who I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art talking about the various social computing and mapping projects currently being worked on there. The Media Lab focuses on how electronic information overlaps with the everyday physical world. Some people might call this cyberculture. She’s known for building innovative interfaces for the online communities, virtual identities, and computer-mediated collaborations that have emerged with the convergence of computing and communication.
* TextArc - A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning. Developed by a good.friend of mine while he was at Digital Image Design.
fuck, sex, social networks