Visualización: La red de comercio global

Mapping Globalization: Visualizing the Network of Global Trade

Manish Nag

Doctoral Candidate at Princeton University

mnag@Princeton.edu

Mapping Globalization: Visualizing the Network of Global Trade

Caption

How global is globalization?  The last 20 years have witnessed an explosion of international connections and transactions: we travel more to each other’s cities, buy more of each others’ products, and are more likely to read each others’ newspapers and best-sellers.  But there are severe limits on the reach and degree of globalization.  European and North American newspapers are more likely to be read by an international audience than their Indian or Brazilian counterparts.  Style and sophistication are still more associated with Paris than Shanghai, not to speak of Mumbai.  When we speak the global language of business, science, and the arts, it sounds remarkably like English.

                Even in the most globalized of arenas, the pattern of relations and connections can still look remarkably like the 19^th century.  Despite the prophesied rise of a “Pacific Century”, most of the global action remains rooted in the North Atlantic.  While the past decades have witnessed the rise of East Asia, the Global South plays a small role in global trade.  This is particularly true of commerce in manufactures and other high value-added products whose production remains concentrated in relatively wealthy countries.  (The design and sales of these products, where the greatest profit can be derived, is even more concentrated).  When the economies at the global margin do participate, they often do so through the sale of a single commodity or through the export of labor.

                Our animation documents this by tracking global trade in 2001.  Counting all possible dyadic transactions we have taken graphic photographs of four levels of trade. The first image of all global trade includes the numerous, but often insignificant, links connecting the globe.  In the next image of the top 75% of trade, the number of countries involved and lines linking these are noticeably reduced (and the overall geographical concentration and centrality of the United States and Western Europe becomes clear). The next picture subtracts even further to the few commercial relationships needed to account for 50% of the total.  In the last image we can see the relatively few country pairs with the largest commercial transactions adding up to 25% of the global total.

Self-Commentary

                Our visualization was created using Sonoma, a new software tool that exists to create geospatial visualizations of social networks. The tool allows researchers to build maps, and then to automatically overlay social network graphs. As a result of using this tool, creating the visualizations was simply a matter of using Sonoma's user interface to define a map projection and map colors, to upload trade network data in a matrix file, and to upload a separate file for latitude and longitude data for each actor on the map.

                For our example, since nations were our actors, we positioned each graph vertex on the nation's capital city. The latitude and longitude data was obtained from the CIA World Factbook. Once, the data files were uploaded, the Sonoma user interface was used to define visual attributes of the network graph's vertices and ties, along with schemes for scaling the colors and widths of ties based on tie weights.

                The matrix data was furnished by the Mapping Globalization website at Princeton. Though the original data provided directed matrix data for world trade, we converted this data to an undirected format by simply taking the sum of trade in both directions between each dyad of nations. The choice was made to use undirected network data because introducing directional arrows in a global map would create too much visual clutter.

                Once images were created in Sonoma, an animation was rendered using Adobe Photoshop.  Due to the existence of Sonoma, the real challenges in creating the visualization were more in the conception and visual design of the visualization.

Though we created visualizations for other percentages of world trade, we found that choosing the top 25, 50, 75, 100 percentages of world trade summarized the larger point of how much the network of nations shrank as we visualized smaller slices of world trade.

PEER REVIEW COMMENT No. 1

This is a creative animation; when all of the global trade is included it does appear as if global trade is truly global, as the map is literally filled with connections.  But the story is quite different, when one only considers the top 75%, 50% or 25% of the global trade: here the marginal countries drop out of the network and only the major industrialized nations remain.  This large scale visualization tells a clear story in a creative manner, but the figure could perhaps be improved by adding a bit of color to liven the picture or layer more information (such as content of trade, say).  It might also be useful to make the edges more transparent, so that the map shows through even when full.

PEER REVIEW COMMENT No. 2

This visualization uses an interactive layout to show how regions of the world are integrated through trade.  At the most integrated level when 100% of global trade is depicted, the entire world appears integrated. When that level is dropped to 75% of global trade, the picture is very different. The wealthiest nations, and within them – regions, remain. This visualization is very effective already, but perhaps a heat color pattern on the underlying picture or variable line thickness would be a nice addition, to help contextualize each ‘slice.’  The dynamic elements are rhetorically effective – the inequality jumps out in the contrast between the slices – but I wonder how effective it would be to shade ties by proportion of world trade and then layer the information as a single figure?

PEER REVIEW COMMENT No. 3

This map does making a striking clear visual case for the inequality among national actors involved in the global economy.  Its use of edge thresholds leads us naturally to the author’s conclusion without needing to convince us with captions and supplementary material.  I would love to see the edges draw with edge opacity proportional to the trade volume represented by the tie (this might yield a single image that displays all ties, but still permits those few, elite, high-volume ties to stand out).

Journal of Social Structure

ARS: El grafo riverplatense

La red social de River, según algunos

Un email anda divulgando una serie de enlaces (como proxy de asociaciones de algún tipo) sobre la red social de las entidades y actores de la escena política del club River Plate (Argentina). ¿Es una red de uno o dos modos? Más allá de la falta de precisiones técnicas, es una atractiva forma de acercar el ARS al escenario de la propaganda política.

vom Lehn: Respuesta a Christakis

christakis vs. dirk vom lehn

OrgTheory.net

Dirk vom Lehn is a lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s College London. His research focuses on ethnomethodology in organizational settings. He asked if I could post this response to Christakis’ NY Times article on the need to update the social sciences.

Stagnating the Social Sciences? A response to Nicholas Christakis?

In his recent piece “Let’s Shake Up the Social Sciences” published in the New York Times on July 19^th, Nicholas Christakis calls for interdisciplinary research that creatively links the social sciences to other disciplines, in particular the natural sciences. I very much welcome his efforts to open a debate about the future of the social sciences. All too often scientists create separate enclaves of knowledge that, if joint up with others, could lead to important new academic, technological and political developments. There however are a few problems with Christakis’ argument. I wish to briefly address three of these problems here:

I am surprised Christakis puts forward the argument that “the social sciences have stagnated” over the past years. He gives no empirical evidence for such a stagnation of the social scientific disciplines and I wonder what the basis for this argument is. If he was to attend the Annual Conference of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in New York in August he will see how sociology has changed over the past few decades, and he will be able to identify specific areas where sociologists have impacted developments in policy, technology, medicine, the sciences, the arts and elsewhere.

His argument ignores also the long-standing cooperation between social scientists, technology developers, computer scientists, medics and health services providers, policy makers, etc. etc. etc. For example, for several decades social scientists, computer scientists and engineers have collaborated at research labs of PARCs,  Microsoft and elsewhere, jointly working to develop new products and services.

Christakis refers to the development of new fields like neuroscience, behavioral economics and others that “lie at the intersection of natural and social sciences”. Because “behavioral economics” is popular also with policy makers let us take this new field as an example: one of the key findings of this new field is the importance of “non-rational action” for people’s decision making. I very much enjoy the creative research undertaken by scholars in this field, but it is quite surprising that it gets away with by-and-large disregarding 100 years of social scientific research. Critique of arguments that prioritize rational action over other types of action has been key to Max Weber’s famous work in the early 1900s, Talcott Parsons’ discussion of the utilitarian dilemma, Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments and many other sociologists’ research and teaching.

Speaking of Garfinkel and his breaching experiments: Christakis suggests that social scientists do not use lab experiments in their teaching. He might be pointed to Garfinkel who used experiments or “tutorial exercises”, as he called them, on a regular basis to have students discover how people organize their action and interaction that bring about society. Experimental research has been conducted also by Carl Couch and the Iowa School since the 1960s with the aim to identify the key elements of social relationships. And, there are a considerable number of more social scientists who have used lab experiments to understand social action and interaction.

However, it has been noticed since that time that society does not happen in the lab. Therefore, in many social scientific disciplines lab experiments are rarely seen as the best way forward to find out about the organization of society. Garfinkel, for example, has continued to use tutorial demonstrations in his teaching but increasingly looked into the organization of the everyday world as it manifested itself in waiting queues, traffic jams and elsewhere. And the Iowa School and its experimental approach has largely vanished whereby its methods and findings can be found in symbolic interactionism and other areas. While the influence of experimental approaches has diminished, naturalistic, ethnographic and video-based research has come to the fore, most notably in workplace studies, in studies of interaction in urban environments and public places as well as in online environments. This body of studies builds on a history of more than 100 years of sociological ethnography, going back, for example, to Robert Park, Everett Hughes and the Chicago School of Sociology. Here, sending students into the field, i.e. into workplaces and schools, onto city streets, on street-markets, into museums, into parks, into Second Life and other virtual worlds, etc. has been at the center of education, training and research as it allows students to discover first-hand how society works. Scholars also increasingly use video-based research to explore the practical organization of work in complex organizations, such as operating theaters in hospitals, control rooms of rapid urban transport systems, museums and galleries, etc.

Christakis’ article is an unfortunate case of a contribution to a debate that means well in steering up discussion about the future of the social sciences, that however ends up playing into the hands of those who have launched an “attack on the social sciences”, as Sally Hillman, Executive Officer at the American Sociological Society, has called it in the association’s newsletter ‘footnote’ in June. Senators and members of the House Science Committee have suggested to “defund” Political Science at the NSF and proposed bills that “would […] prevent NSF from funding any social science research” (Hillman June 2013).

Articles like Christakis’ imply that current social sciences have little impact on society, policy makers and knowledge development more generally, whilst research in the natural sciences, in their view, has more “impact”. They, however, overlook and disregard social scientific research that has been forgotten because scholars and policy makers follow the latest fads and fashions, such as so-called Big Data research and the opportunities of brain-scans, rather than using and further developing the existing theoretical, methodological and empirical basis of the social sciences. Moreover, they pretend that the social sciences and the natural sciences basically could achieve the same impact, if only the social sciences would make appropriate use of scientific methods. Thereby, however, they ignore what social scientists have shown over and over again over the past 100 years or so, i.e. that the social is fundamentally different from nature; it always is already interpreted when the social scientist arrives. The ‘social’ requires interpretation of a different kind than nature as encountered and then interpreted by natural scientists. Furthermore, people often change their behavior in response to the research process and in response to social scientific findings. Nature remains nature. Apples keep falling down from trees.

I am all in favor of interdisciplinary research and benefit enormously from my cooperation with scholars and practitioners in the computer and health sciences as well as in the arts and humanities. I also find Christiakis’ research interesting and important. However, to use the need for interdisciplinarity as an argument for the defunding of established social science disciplines would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. The social scientific knowledge base developed over the past 100 or more years is too precious to sacrifice just for instrumental reasons; i.e. to satisfy policy makers interested in saving money or to show “impact” however that is defined.

While the social sciences rely on and advance their knowledge base they have not been stagnating. On the contrary, they have prospered and further developed by virtue of discussions at discipline-specific conferences and in their journals as well as by cooperating with a wide range of other disciplines.

Dr Dirk vom Lehn
Lecturer in Marketing, Interaction & Technology
Department of Management
King’s College London
Franklin-Wilkins Building, 150 Stamford Street
London SE1 9NH

Tel. +44 20 78484314
dirk.vom_lehn@kcl.ac.uk

http:///www.vom-lehn.net

Christakis: Un sacudón hacia la complejidad en las ciencias sociales

Let’s Shake Up the Social Sciences

By NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a graduate student, there were departments of natural science that no longer exist today. Departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology have disappeared, replaced by innovative departments of stem-cell biology, systems biology, neurobiology and molecular biophysics. Taking a page from Darwin, the natural sciences are evolving with the times. The perfection of cloning techniques gave rise to stem-cell biology; advances in computer science contributed to systems biology. Whole new fields of inquiry, as well as university departments and majors, owe their existence to fresh discoveries and novel tools.

In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. Such inertia reflects an unnecessary insecurity and conservatism, and helps explain why the social sciences don’t enjoy the same prestige as the natural sciences.

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. Like natural scientists, they should be able to say, “We have figured this topic out to a reasonable degree of certainty, and we are now moving our attention to more exciting areas.” But they do not.

I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them.

So social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics.

Such interdisciplinary efforts are also generating practical insights about fundamental problems like chronic illness, energy conservation, pandemic disease, intergenerational poverty and market panics. For example, a better understanding of the structure and function of human social networks is helping us understand which individuals within social systems have an outsize impact when it comes to the spread of germs or the spread of ideas. As a result, we now have at our disposal new ways to accelerate the adoption of desirable practices as diverse as vaccination in rural villages and seat-belt use among urban schoolchildren.

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. Eventually, these departments would themselves be dismantled or transmuted as science continues to advance.

Some recent examples offer a glimpse of the potential. At Yale, the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs applies diverse social sciences to the study of international issues and offers a new major. At Harvard, the sub-discipline of physical anthropology, which increasingly relies on modern genetics, was hived off the anthropology department to make the department of human evolutionary biology. Still, such efforts are generally more like herds splitting up than like new species emerging. We have not yet changed the basic DNA of the social sciences. Failure to do so might even result in having the natural sciences co-opt topics rightly and beneficially in the purview of the social sciences.

New social science departments could also help to better train students by engaging in new types of pedagogy. For example, in the natural sciences, even college freshmen do laboratory experiments. Why is this rare in the social sciences? When students learn about social phenomena, why don’t they go to the lab to examine them — how markets reach equilibrium, how people cooperate, how social ties are formed? Newly invented tools make this feasible. It is now possible to use the Internet to enlist thousands of people to participate in randomized experiments. This seems radical only because our current social science departments weren’t organized to teach this way.

For the past century, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve important problems. The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today’s intellectual challenges.

Sunday Review - NYT

Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale University, is a co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.

Cherny: Simplificando a las redes sociales

Simplifying Social Network Diagrams from Lynn Cherny

Cherny: Visualizando redes más allá del ovillo de lana

Visualizing Networks: Beyond the Hairball from OReillyStrata

Los jovénes ricos más proclives a conductas de levante

Why Wealthy College Kids Are More Into 'Hooking Up' Than Their Poorer Classmates

PETER JACOBS - Busines Insider

The New York Times' recent article on the hookup culture at the University of Pennsylvania has garnered many fiery responses, with current and former Penn students blasting the piece for everything from its casual treatment of rape to its reliance on anonymity. 

Even the Daily Pennsylvania — UPenn's student newspaper — has come out swinging against the Times, noting:

The response has been largely critical, and for good reason: In her failed attempt to glimpse a part of Penn’s culture, Taylor drew conclusions that inaccurately represented and overly generalized the University’s student body.

Despite its many issues, one tidbit deeply buried in the article deserves more attention.

According to the article, two researchers who followed a group of women at IndianaUniversity from their freshman to senior years found that "women from wealthier backgrounds were much more likely to hook up, more interested in postponing adult responsibilities and warier of serious romantic commitment than their less-affluent classmates. The women from less-privileged backgrounds looked at their classmates who got drunk and hooked up as immature."

In an excellent breakdown of the Times' article on Jezebel, writer Tracy Moore sums this up as "Rich ladies like to PARTY, poor girls have to keep it real...virginal." Moore notes that she finds class-based attitudes towards casual sex "actually really fascinating," although "it's almost never explored."

While the research on privilege and hooking up is sparse at best, a 2009 study from Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong — the two researchers quoted in the Times — sheds some light on this often overlooked field. After speaking with a diverse group of women at a Midwest university, here's what they found:

• The dominant college culture "reflects the beliefs of the more privileged classes."
• Less privileged women's disinterest in hooking up could be "characterized by a faster transition into adulthood."
• For less privileged women not interested in hooking up, "college life could be experienced as mystifying, uncomfortable, and alienating."
• 40% of less privileged women left the university, compared to 5% of more privileged women, and "In all cases, mismatch between the sexual culture of women’s hometowns and that of college was a factor in the decision to leave."
• Many less privileged women left the university because of pressure from boyfriends or husbands back home, or to end hometown speculation that they were now a "slut."
• Because less privileged women "had less exposure to the notion that the college years should be set aside solely for educational and career development"they often did not view "serious relationships as incompatible with college life."

While the entire report is fascinating and worth a read, its findings are not without opponents. Although not a direct response to Hamilton and Armstrong's paper, a 2012 study on college sexual activity from researchers at Georgia Southern University found that social class is not a "significant predictor of hooking up." Clearly, this is an area that still requires some study.