Mapping Scientific Influence
Ben Schmidt at Sapping Attention has a beautiful post up (with many pretty pictures) and exactly the sort of smart analysis one expects from his blog. Among the most interesting---albeit very tentative--- conclusions he comes to:
The 'while/whilst' result is suggestive, in that it indicates we can track cultural phenomena completely independent of science in the data. (India looks more like America, while Australia and South Africa look more like Britain: that's interesting to me.)
The university and city stuff can be interesting as well if we look in the right places. Obviously no one cares that "Harvard" is used more than "Stanford" in Cambridge; but the higher results for Stanford near CERN, and for Harvard--to stretch--in Australia may be telling us interesting things about the way that a project like the SLAC can get international recognition.
In Schmidt's hands, the ArXiv becomes a tool for seeing scientific connections inside and across national…
The 'while/whilst' result is suggestive, in that it indicates we can track cultural phenomena completely independent of science in the data. (India looks more like America, while Australia and South Africa look more like Britain: that's interesting to me.)
The university and city stuff can be interesting as well if we look in the right places. Obviously no one cares that "Harvard" is used more than "Stanford" in Cambridge; but the higher results for Stanford near CERN, and for Harvard--to stretch--in Australia may be telling us interesting things about the way that a project like the SLAC can get international recognition.
In Schmidt's hands, the ArXiv becomes a tool for seeing scientific connections inside and across national…