The part of this reading that stuck out the most to me was the idea that putting data into networks is like trying to fit “square pegs in round holes.” We always assume that everything we want to explain can be explained – but this might not be the case. In order to put items into graphs or networks, you pull out the similarities between the items to relate them to other things. In this process, some of the complexity may be lost because the network doesn’t represent the individual uniqueness of each item. But even so, as he mentions in his blog post, networks become seemingly less useful when they are more complex and dense. In this sense, it makes it seem to me that networks should be used to show relationships between things that maybe are simple and don’t have a lot in common but are somehow connected in some way.
In my opinion, the most interesting types of networks are those that involve relationships between people. Part of the reason I became interested in Digital Humanities in the first place was because I find it fascinating to interconnect technology with real people. In networking relationships, you can put on display a relationship that is not visible in the real world. You can take feelings and connections and make them tangible. This really is putting a square peg in a round hole, though, because relationships aren’t meant to be networked. Humans and human qualities aren’t meant to be translated into computer code – and yet, we’ve done it! The easiest and most concrete example of this would definitely be a family tree. It displays visually the ties between people using edges. We may not know exactly how we are connected to a family member way in the past, and this network visualization would be able to tell us this. Relationship networks are just the most fascinating to me because it still captures something so real. It is much easier to understand the relationship between a book and its author and to put it on paper to show the relationship, but relationships between people are so complex that to stick them on a graph with lines connecting them to a few other things simplifies their depth tremendously. But this is what networks are all about, translating something into a manner of understanding that can prove a specific point.
Weingart, Scott. “Demystifying Networks.” Scottbot. N.p., 14 Dec. 2011. Web.