Last week I submitted version 2.0 of Habitation in the Anthropocene: An Interdisciplinary Interaction contribution to  the Social Media in the Anthropocene project. Please click the screenshot of the homepage to visit.

This site collects 16 posts which ran earlier this year, and visualizes relationships among them by means of a set of network graphs. The relationships represented have to do with the intellectual approaches taken in the posts, the themes they address, and outlooks they take on those themes. The graphs are annotated to help readers navigate among the posts: readers can choose sequences of posts based on interpretive guidance about how posts engage with each other.

Version 1.0 appeared at the end of June. Since then I have made several changes. The site’s “look and feel” is substantially the same as before. The most important change is that it is possible to get to posts directly from the home page, rather than having to to choose a “view” of the posts first. And, in response to comments that the amount of information the site offered about the relationships among the posts could feel overwhelming, I have placed as much of the explanatory apparatus as I could in the background–it is accessible with a click or two, but I hope the site is not quite as loud, so to speak, as before.

The content of the site is substantially the same as well–though I did add an additional view, which is reflected by the graph on the home page, seen above. I learned the technique of social network analysis, by reading the wonderful essay from a couple of years ago by Kieran Healy, “Using Metadata to find Paul Revere.” (I owe that reference to Andy Halterman, an acquaintance from Norman who is now in the Ph.D. program in Political Science at MIT, with whom I had an extremely enlightening discussion about network theory during the summer.) Using that technique I produced the “Emergent Pairings View” that links posts directly, on the basis of their sharing approaches and outlooks on themes.

The site has now entered the review process for the Social Media in the Anthropocene project. But even while that is ongoing, all of us who participated in the project would welcome your comments on the project.