Structure and Dynamics

The Structure and Dynamics eJournal offers a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We invite you—as an open access reader at no cost, an author at no cost, or a volunteer, to submit book reviews or commentary—to contribute and to participate in raising the aspirations of the human sciences today. To submit an article, follow the link to “Submission guidelines.” To submit a review simply click Submit a “Reader's Comment” at the article site.

We comment here on the contents and success of the first two issues. Full-text downloads of the eJournal articles numbered 5,313 in the 11 months since September 23, 2005, now averaging 16-17 a day. This reflects positively on quality of the articles, made possible in turn by the high quality and incisiveness of reviews, the number and diversity of reviewers who have responded, and selection for quality in article acceptance and reviewers (and we thank our reviewers for their efforts at timely review).

In just two issues, the eJournal has come a long way in attaining the goals set out for it as a publication in which scholarship and debate can be engaged in contemporary fields of research, one that provides a venue for the study of the complex interplay between dynamics and structure, and gives an outlet for methods and results which speak to the issues of simplicity in complexity and the study of structure and dynamics. It has also facilitated presentations of new forms of analysis and visualization, new forums for debate and new vehicles for the dissemination and absorption of work at the cutting edges of the human sciences.

Authors of issue 1#1 have had feedback and good reception. Peter Turchin’s findings on historical dynamics have been replicated, for example, using data covering a 700-year period from archaeological research in the Southwest. The replication study is in press in the journal Complexity. Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory, cites Turchin’s article in issue 1#1. Several of the issue 1#1 articles are now reviewed in blogs and on-line commentaries, digests, or reference lists, many with timely google citations. Links to them are starting to appear on educational sites at which students have direct access to download and on-line readership. Issue 1#1 marked our first use of high-quality color imagery and live url links. Krempel and Schnegg’s paper explained our journal’s dynamic-gif logo in their “About the Image: Diffusion Dynamics in an Historical Network,” which also allows the reader to link to the authors’ longer 1998 study and its on-line imagery. That article, “Exposure, Networks and Mobilization: The Petition Movement during the 1848/49 Revolution in a German Town,” published at http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/~lk/netvis/exposure, provides further background and examples for the innovative use of dynamic graphics.

Summing up our current issue, 1#2, and to give readers an idea of the unusual and unique features of electronic publication, we review the advantages and evolution of our permanent, paper-quality, refereed eJournal publications. Along with our use of live url links and imagery on-line, these advantages are facilitated by our UC eScholarship publisher.

In 1#2, Sean Downey provides a fascinating study that interrogates ethnographic and historical texts with the aid of simulation. He uses his approach to analyze the ethnographic/historical theory put forward by noted author Paul Willis in Learning to Labor, secondarily to show strengths and weaknesses of contemporary social theories such as those of Tony Giddens (1984) and, finally, also to identify the descriptive lacunae that limit this genre of simulation. As an invaluable gift to students and instructors (he is himself a graduate student), he supplies on-line the code for the simulation and, as a free resource, access to the simulation software package itself.

Christiansen and Altaweel’s “Understanding Ancient Societies,” subtitled “A New Approach Using Agent-Based Holistic Modeling,” describes their Argonne National Labs holistic agent-based simulation framework that couples with incredible depth to the real-world information that can be brought into simulation and modeling from the earth sciences, satellite imagery, climate modeling, the agricultural sciences, ethnography, network analysis, and a host of other areas. Focusing on the development of their model for addressing research questions about Mesopotamia, they explain and illustrate the general-purpose simulation framework. Their work offers a productive complementarity to Algaze’s lead article in our first issue, where he poses a series of questions, hypotheses, and possible lines of evidence with which to explore the processes that lead to the first cities’ takeoff.

Wouter de Nooy’s study of the networks and the structural dynamics of folktale plots, tested as well against literary interactions through time among Dutch literary critics, uses network analysis software described in his coauthored book with the software authors (de Nooy, Batagelj, and Mrvar 2005). He gives us the first-ever published SVG image produced by Pajek network software with interactivity within the SVG image itself (now available from the Pajek freeware authors at http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/). The SVG image is not simply static but directly accessible, thanks to live links inside our eScholarship pdfs, as an interactive graphic that the reader can explore for different views of the data.

Wilkinson and Tsirel evaluate limit cycles in Indic regional political polarities—how many polities in each ten year interval, coded from a comprehensive database—over two millennia. They begin with the simplest of models of temporal dynamics and historical limit cycles and proceed to evaluate at each step those of increasing complexity. The visual scanability of their multicolor graphical results helps to give the reader an ability to judge visually the contribution of different kinds of statistical analyses to understanding the complexity of the data and, in turn, the plausibility of different historical processes and explanations.

Seary, Richards, McKeown-Eyssen, and Baines, in their “Networks of Symptoms and Exposures,” provide an innovation that makes possible a better comprehension of statistical interactions in complex phenomena by enabling the reader to recognize linkages within complex data such as those in the field of medicine. The visual imagery of their 3-dimensional interactive “panigram” images, named from the Greek panis (“sail”), provides a generalization of simpler histograms that, by analogy, would be composed by an ordering of the one-dimensional heights of the ship’s masts. The 3-D panigrams form an analog of planar sails rotatable about masts that represent the spines of the data structure. Co-authoring with professionals in the medical field, they use these images to look at the interrelations of people, their exposures to disease, and how symptoms are jointly distributed across both.

Berkowitz, with his collaborators Woodward and Woodward, draws on his scholarship about the role of family and informal institutions in historical world economies to write of venerable and legal networks of exchange that have operated for millennia and yet that make it impossible to trace financial transactions through the modern computerized credit banking systems. His scholarship, interrupted by untimely death in 2003, is honored in this issue.

Palmer, Steadman, and Coe, in “More Kin: An Effect of the Tradition of Marriage,” utilize genealogical graphics, a mathematical model of networks and demography, and analysis of the relation between biology and culture to reopen important questions about the role of human kinship systems in human evolution, considered both in terms of networks and cognition. Their results for numbers of kin at various distances in bilateral kinship networks, depending both on demography and issues of social recognition, are cited in the article by Moody.

James Moody’s “Fighting a Hydra: A Note on the Network Embeddedness of the War on Terror,” shares in common with Berkowitz et al.’s article a concern for misunderstandings that prompted and have emerged out of the War on Terror. Moody writes of the effects of misguided policies, such as described in the recent best seller by Thomas Ricks (2006), that fail to take into account the “blowback” consequences of the killing, wounding, and arresting of civilians and the torture of suspected insurgents. He considers as well the effects of the wounding and deaths of soldiers, recruited into such wars, on those in their home communities, families and social networks. His on-line innovation is to provide students and the reader with a calculator for the network scale-up model of Killworth et al. (1998) to estimate the number of people who know somebody in an “event,” such as those killed in the war. “Since the values needed to make these estimates are rapidly changing and somewhat subjective, users can test the effect of different assumptions with this calculator,” as noted within the calculator itself. In our review, we highlight the general properties of the scale-up model, of which we shall see more in future articles.