22,170 research outputs found
Scaling and Universality in City Space Syntax: between Zipf and Matthew
We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces
in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities
(Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space
represents for other spaces directly linked to it in a city follows a power law
statistic. Universal statistical behavior of space syntax measures uncovers the
universality of the city creation mechanism. We suggest that the observed
universality may help to establish the international definition of a city as a
specific land use pattern.Comment: 24 pages, 5 *.eps figure
Complex networks analysis in socioeconomic models
This chapter aims at reviewing complex networks models and methods that were
either developed for or applied to socioeconomic issues, and pertinent to the
theme of New Economic Geography. After an introduction to the foundations of
the field of complex networks, the present summary adds insights on the
statistical mechanical approach, and on the most relevant computational aspects
for the treatment of these systems. As the most frequently used model for
interacting agent-based systems, a brief description of the statistical
mechanics of the classical Ising model on regular lattices, together with
recent extensions of the same model on small-world Watts-Strogatz and
scale-free Albert-Barabasi complex networks is included. Other sections of the
chapter are devoted to applications of complex networks to economics, finance,
spreading of innovations, and regional trade and developments. The chapter also
reviews results involving applications of complex networks to other relevant
socioeconomic issues, including results for opinion and citation networks.
Finally, some avenues for future research are introduced before summarizing the
main conclusions of the chapter.Comment: 39 pages, 185 references, (not final version of) a chapter prepared
for Complexity and Geographical Economics - Topics and Tools, P.
Commendatore, S.S. Kayam and I. Kubin Eds. (Springer, to be published
City networks in cyberspace and time : using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises
Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial
importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational
classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change
Property and the Construction of the Information Economy: A Neo-Polanyian Ontology
This chapter considers the changing roles and forms of information property within the political economy of informational capitalism. I begin with an overview of the principal methods used in law and in media and communications studies, respectively, to study information property, considering both what each disciplinary cluster traditionally has emphasized and newer, hybrid directions. Next, I develop a three-part framework for analyzing information property as a set of emergent institutional formations that both work to produce and are themselves produced by other evolving political-economic arrangements. The framework considers patterns of change in existing legal institutions for intellectual property, the ongoing dematerialization and datafication of both traditional and new inputs to economic production, and the emerging logics of economic organization within which information resources (and property rights) are mobilized. Finally, I consider the implications of that framing for two very different contemporary information property projects, one relating to data flows within platform-based business models and the other to information commons
Evolution of Wikipedia's Category Structure
Wikipedia, as a social phenomenon of collaborative knowledge creating, has
been studied extensively from various points of views. The category system of
Wikipedia, introduced in 2004, has attracted relatively little attention. In
this study, we focus on the documentation of knowledge, and the transformation
of this documentation with time. We take Wikipedia as a proxy for knowledge in
general and its category system as an aspect of the structure of this
knowledge. We investigate the evolution of the category structure of the
English Wikipedia from its birth in 2004 to 2008. We treat the category system
as if it is a hierarchical Knowledge Organization System, capturing the changes
in the distributions of the top categories. We investigate how the clustering
of articles, defined by the category system, matches the direct link network
between the articles and show how it changes over time. We find the Wikipedia
category network mostly stable, but with occasional reorganization. We show
that the clustering matches the link structure quite well, except short periods
preceding the reorganizations.Comment: Preprint of an article submitted for consideration in Advances in
Complex Systems (2012) http://www.worldscinet.com/acs/, 19 pages, 7 figure
Folksonomy: the New Way to Serendipity
Folksonomy expands the collaborative process by allowing contributors to index content. It rests on three powerful properties: the absence of a prior taxonomy, multi-indexation and the absence of thesaurus. It concerns a more exploratory search than an entry in a search engine. Its original relationship-based structure (the three-way relationship between users, content and tags) means that folksonomy allows various modalities of curious explorations: a cultural exploration and a social exploration. The paper has two goals. Firstly, it tries to draw a general picture of the various folksonomy websites. Secundly, since labelling lacks any standardisation, folksonomies are often under threat of invasion by noise. This paper consequently tries to explore the different possible ways of regulating the self-generated indexation process.taxonomy; indexation; innovation and user-created content
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