UA School of Sociology Brown Bag Series Presents: Dr. Charles Gomez

When

noon to 1:20 p.m., April 23, 2021

Talk Title: "Towards an Ecology of Global Scientific Research: Modeling Knowledge Production with Networks and Topic Models."

The Sociology Brownbag will be held online via Zoom at the link below from 12:00-1:15PM on April 23:

 

Zoom link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/85677146091

 

Zoom password: dynamics

 

Please find an abstract of Professor Gomez's talk below, as well as a note on procedure: 

 

"Ecological metaphors and measures successfully describe the dynamics of organizations, urban landscapes, and international trade. This includes not only the proliferation of new forms and relationships, but also predicting what becomes extinct. Science as a diverse, interdependent, and global enterprise exhibits many systemic traits that mirror these ecological dynamics in terms of what is researched (or not researched) and where. Nestedness is an ecological measure which, when applied to bipartite networks of species and their geographic locales, describes the tendency for sites with a lower number of species to be subsets of richer sites. Ecosystems that exhibit higher nestedness are considered more stable and better describe where species may appear or go extinct. We offer a network-based ecological framework to model the dynamics of global knowledge production in science. We use metadata from scientific publications curated in the Microsoft Academic Graph and apply topic models to its abstracts. We distill which countries are focusing on which research topics across fields over time and measure the nestedness of these bipartite structures."

 

Professor Gomez writes to us that this particular line of his work is in a relatively early stage of development, and that he would like to benefit from discussing his research approach and initial findings with UA faculty and grad students. He plans to present for about 25 - 30 minutes, giving an overview of work to date, and then invite discussion, suggestions, and feedback.