Social Modelling Working-Group

There are many people who are working on a lot of cool projects involving models of social action at the CSSS. A few of us (so far: Lynette Shaw and Bogdan State) are interested in getting a group together to meet and discuss general theoretical and methodological issues related to social models. Add your name if you're interested!

Anne Johnson I'm interested too.

Rajani R. Shenoy

Zoe Henscheid

Avril Kenney I haven't done work in this area but I'd be interested in discussions about it.

Andreas If we take Tom's word for it (and some people seem to doubt it) the field of theoretical networks is still so young, that the actual translation into "real" social problems is very limited. Except of course Twitter and the internet. My own approach to combining some social elements into ABM is basically throwing together some heuristics. That's not very thorough... Are there better solutions out there? At the same time keeping in mind that too much detail will probably also kill the model.

Sarah Wise I'm very much interested in this.

Can I suggest that we all meet at lunch today? Perhaps we could also meet after the last lecture today. My thinking is that it would be great to get together prior to having to decide on projects. I'm also thinking that this group would serve as an ongoing collaboration group which could include multiple projects. Thoughts? Anne Johnson

If we could meet for lunch, that would be great! Rajani R. Shenoy

Count me in. I've been putting together some common-property related social simulation readings that might be relevant, by the way. When you say lunch "today" I'm guessing from the timestamps that we mean June 10? Or have I missed you all? (I think this wiki isn't quite in the right timezone - it shows people editing 4 hours in the future.) -- Dan MacKinlay

Micael Ehn I'm interested

Good point about the time zones :o) Yes, Thursday, June 10. How about we just meet at the back of the lecture room at the end of Nathan's talk? So around 1200? We can just figure things out from there. Anne Johnson

Subjects of Interest

• Homophily
  • Miller McPherson - "Birds of a Feather}
• Organizational Behavior
  • Rational Choice Model: Irrationality being blocked by the interaction of people
  • Open Polity: Hayagreeva Rao
  • Emergent Group Behavior
  • Company as an Individual: how to find behavioral rules for companies
  • DiMaggio & Powell: Isomorphism
  • Meyer & Rowan, 1971 - Legitimacy
  • Hannan & anyone
  • orgtheory.net
  • Herb Simon: Bounded Rationality
• Social Animal Groups and communication degradation
  • Suggestion: doing an Agent-Based Model to explore emergent behavior, but not to predict what is going to happen.
  • Chaotic System
  • Mandelbrot, Misbehavior of Markets

Intend to create a bibliography of "must reads" from each group member and/or for each group member's focus. Cross-referenced to see where overlaps in thoughts, fields, and focuses have already occured, and possibly to create a list of searchable meta-tags.