The Journal of Social Structure has published this paper regarding the visualization of social roles in online discussion groups by Howard Wesler. It may be of interest for its ethnographic approach to the data collection and visualization of USENET threads. The conclusions drawn seem to indicate that such research has value for its ability to potentially automatically identify social roles that emerge in relation to network infrastructure and in so doing structure the network in a way that more appropriately/effectively cultivates specific roles or styles of interaction. I’d see this as an interesting inversion of the usually stated aim to map the network in order to engineer better networks of the future – here there is a concern for the way the network infrastructure and interface produces the user producing the network. There are interesting parallels between this work and the IBM Communications Lab’s work on wikipedia. Both of these projects are also related to Chris Harrison’s work which I’ll account for in another post.