The IPCC as a Social Network: The Working Group I Summary for Policymakers

Just a quick post to get this blog going again. Below is a network map of the authors of three chapters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Assessment Reports (released in 2001, 2007, and 2013, respectively).

The chapter in question is the Working Group I Summary for Policymakers, the working group dealing with the physical science of climate change. There are 151 authors pictured in the image, with 26 of those authors writing for more than one Assessment Report. Four authors (in the center) were involved in all three years. A red connection means that that author was a Lead Author in that year, a blue connection denotes Contributing Authors.

By my count, 24 of the 26 (92%) "multi-report" authors are from Annex I (industrialized) countries. This includes all four authors in the center of the image.

Visualizing the UK National Ecosystem Assessment

For my recent master's dissertation, I studied the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK NEA), a government-initiated scientific assessment of the UK's ecosystems, their value to society, and policy options for their protection. One of the biggest challenges when researching an assessment of this type is keeping track of the large number of contributors involved. In the case of the UK NEA, the contributors numbered upwards of 500 people. In a process where some authors contributed to multiple chapters, keeping track of everyone and their relationships to each other is difficult.

To handle this complex situation, I used Gephi to create a network map which presents the UK NEA's authors as a social network held together by co-authorship. Using author data from the Assessment itself, I was able to create a map which included all 403 people who were listed as authors for at least one of the UK NEA's chapters.

UK NEA Authorship Network Map

The image above is based on a very simple foundation. Each circle represents one of the UK NEA's authors. A connection between two authors means that they co-authored at least one chapter together. In the center of the network, purple connections identify authors who co-authored the high-level Synthesis for Policy Makers. Magenta connections represent co-authorship of the Assessment's introductory chapters, while green connections represent habitat-based chapters that focused on specific types of ecosystems such as woodlands or freshwaters. Light green connections (found at the bottom of the image) are related to ecosystem services chapters, and gold connections signify country-focused chapters (in this case the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Finally, blue connections are related to ecosystem service valuation and scenario building (the valuation aspect of the UK NEA was the main focus of my dissertation research).

So what insights, if any, does this network map provide? First, the map confirms - and visualizes - a number of features of the UK NEA authorship network that I noticed during my research. For example, many of the authors were involved in only one chapter of the assessment, and these groups form dense, easy-to-distinguish clusters within the network. Connecting these clusters are a relatively small number of multi-chapter authors, as can be seen here in this close-up:

Author Clusters with Two "Connector" Authors (Center)

Second, the map helps illustrate the relationship between chapters written mainly by ecologists (green connections) and other chapters largely written by economists and social scientists (blue connections). Some ecology-focused chapters were relatively closely connected to the valuation chapters because they included ecologists or economists who also worked on ecosystem service valuation (Clusters A and B below). Other ecology chapters were not connected directly to the valuation chapters (Cluster C). Why the difference? This topic was not my focus, but it could be an interesting one to explore.

Ecology Chapters and Their Connection to Valuation Chapters

However, I believe that these network maps may be most useful for identifying effective research strategies. For example, if a researcher was studying interdisciplinarity in scientific assessments, they could use the network map above to identify the UK NEA authors who connected different chapters. They could then request an interview with these "connector" authors in order to learn more about the process of exchange both between chapters and between academic disciplines.

So, is creating a network map worth the time investment? (around 10-15 hours for the UK NEA map above) The answer depends on the research questions being pursued. But given the (relatively) easy learning curve for network software like Gephi, network visualization could be a valuable addition to researchers' intellectual toolkit. 

A (Network) Map of Europe

As part of my last job, I got a chance to work with network visualization and analysis as it related to biodiversity research in the EU. In the past month or so, I have also been working on a few fun side projects like the one below: a network map of Europe. 

In the map below, each point in the network (or "node") represents a European country that is a member of the United Nations. Two countries are linked in the network if they share a border; for example, at the top right Turkey and Greece share a border and so are linked together. Some non-European countries - such as China - are included because they share a border with a European country. 

A Network Map of Europe
(Full-size, Creative Commons-licensed image available here)

The size of a node is determined by how many other countries it shares a border with. On one extreme, Russia borders 14 other countries and is the largest node in the network. On the other end of the spectrum, the island nations of Malta (top-left corner) and Iceland (top-right corner) do not border any countries, and are visualized as tiny, free-floating nodes.

The network also contains five "communities" of nodes that are closely connected to each other, color-coded below as green, dark blue, light blue, dark orange, and light orange. These communities were defined by running a statistical test (for "modularity") on the free network visualization software Gephi.

This map was just for fun, but what could techniques like this offer to researchers or policy-makers working on European issues?

Sources

Border information is drawn from Wikipedia. Unlike the Wikipedia article, I did not include Kosovo because it is not a member of the United Nations and its sovereignty is disputed. 

Writing as thinking and as presentation

This post is a modified version of a piece I wrote as part of the Oxford University Conservation Governance Lab.

In this post, I am going to make a distinction between writing as thinking about research and writing as presenting research. I feel that my habits and techniques are quite different depending on which writing mode I am in at the moment.

Writing as thinking

“Writing is thinking in slow motion. We see what at normal speeds escapes us, can rerun the reel at will to look for errors, erase, interpolate, and rethink. Most thoughts are a light rain, fall upon the ground, and dry up. Occasionally they become a stream that runs a short distance before it disappears. Writing stands an incomparably better chance of getting somewhere.”
-Walter Kaufmann, 1968

I often use writing as a way to think through my research in a relatively free-flowing, unedited way. One member of the faculty here has talked about how he often lets a paper roll around in his head for a while before putting his thoughts on paper. That approach is very difficult for me, mainly because I cannot map out a piece of writing in my head; my process of mapping almost always requires a piece of paper which I add to iteratively over a period of hours or days.

So how do I use writing in this way? During my dissertation and following Bolker (1998), I tried to write at least two pages a day, ideally starting in the morning when I first opened up my computer. This freewriting almost never involved me making detailed arguments. It was simply a way to allow ideas to “pop up” out of my sub-conscious. I would then regularly read through the resulting massive pile of words to pick out useful ideas or research directions. For instance, I can still pinpoint when I looked at the 1,500 page UK National Ecosystem Assessment and chose to focus on ecosystem service valuation:

“It may be interesting, as sites for both the goals of the report and of interdisciplinary interaction at “the ground level”, to focus on the valuation chapters.” (July 6)

A more structured way that I went about “writing as thinking” was to create “research memos” that synthesized my thinking about the literature I was reading (I got the idea from Bryman 2012). For instance, I created a memo on “collective action framing” which served as a “workshop” where I could combine the perspectives I was finding in the literature with my own critical analysis. These memos almost never turned into complete, edited documents. However, many sentences/paragraphs/perspectives from those memos ended up in the final document (especially the literature review section).

Writing as presentation

I have to admit that I am less self-aware about how I write documents that are going to be assessed or published. I have tried to “freewrite” pieces before, but that technique really just doesn’t seem to work for me when writing up a draft. I think it is because my perfectionist nature (related to writing) means that I am overwhelmed by the number of things that need to be changed in such a rough form. I prefer to slowly write a section piece by piece, so that the first, rough draft is at least readable and flows together. In other words, freewriting works for me when creating rough ideas – what Bolker refers to as the “zero draft” – but when it comes to the actual first draft I prefer to think through the process. However, aside from general headings (introduction, methods, results, etc.), I don’t tend to map out the structure of what I am writing until the first round of editing on my first draft. However, I probably need to spend more time thinking about the flow of my papers, as I often get feedback saying that the overall structure does not “hang together” as well as it could.

I am also interested in the psychology of writing. I find writing quite stressful, especially when writing for presentation. This is especially true on long documents with lots of moving parts, such as my dissertation and the textbook that I edited in my previous job. To deal with my sense of being overwhelmed by complexity, I have started to create a separate document titled “writing way point”. In this document, I write or edit ONLY the section that I am actively working on, which prevents me from giving into the urge to skip to the next section and then become overwhelmed. And at the end of large projects, I tend to turn off the clock on my computer as well as the word count on Microsoft Word to try to limit my immediate attention to the words on the page.

As a final note, I wrote this blog post straight through and opened up about seven other documents to pull in bits and pieces that I wanted to include. Now I will go through to look for typos and add references.

So how does everyone else write?

References

Bryman, A., 2012. Social Research Methods. 4th ed. Oxford University Press, USA.

Bolker, J. 1998. Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day : a guide to starting, revising, and finishing your doctoral thesis. New York : H. Holt