Merry Christmas! With Data - Science Blog Social Network

Merry Christmas! 

What better Christmas present than fresh data?! (says the PhD science-communication nerd.)

 

In the last few weeks, I've been collecting survey responses from science bloggers about their content decisions and other blogging practices. I closed #MySciBlog survey last week, after collecting over 600 valid survey responses from science bloggers. Now begins data analysis! 

In one particularly exploratory section of my survey, participants were asked to list up to the top three science blogs, other than their own, that they read on a regular basis. With this data, I'm looking to explore potential communities of practice and relationships between science bloggers that may lead to shared content decision rules or blogging approaches.

After pulling the data into Excel and rather tediously cleaning it up (looking for blogs listed under alternative or incorrect, names, etc.), I mapped the resulting dataset in Gephi, an open and free social network mapping software. I then laid out the network (consisting of survey participant blog nodes connected via up to three edges to target 'regularly read' science blogs) according to a ForceAtlas 2 algorithm. 

"ForceAtlas2 is a force directed layout: it simulates a physical system in order to spatialize a network. Nodes repulse each other like charged particles, while edges attract their nodes, like springs. These forces create a movement that converges to a balanced state. This final configuration is expected to help the interpretation of the data." - Plos One 

Each node in the network represents a science blog - either a survey participant's blog or a blog listed by a participant. Communities (represented by color-coded nodes) were detected automatically in Gephi (modularity class function) with a resolution of 3.0. Nodes and node labels are sized according to in-degree, or how many times the blog (node) was listed by other bloggers as regularly read.

 

Full resolution figure (PDF) available at Figshare.com. Cite as Brown, Paige (2014): MySciBlog Survey - Top Read SciBlogs by SciBloggers. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1278974

You can check out a full-resolution PDF of this data here. As you do so, please let me know if you see any blogs represented as more than one node, under misspelled names for instance. Your feedback can help me consolidate any redundant data. Also, I'd love to hear your thoughts on any trends or relationships you might see emerging from this data! It will be very interesting if my survey results reveal common blogging practices among bloggers who share neighbors in this network. My in-depth interviews with science bloggers do reveal that bloggers often glean lessons in blogging approaches, styles, "do's" and "don'ts" from other science blogs that they commonly read.

Happy data exploration!