Visualising virtual communities: From Erdős to the arts

Monitoring communities has become increasingly easy on the web as the number of visualisation tools and amount of data available about communities increase. It is possible to visualise connections on social and professional networks such as Facebook in the form of mathematical graphs. It is also possible to visualise connections between authors of papers. In particular, Microsoft Academic Search now has a large corpus of information on publications, together with author and citation information, that can be visualised in a number of ways. In mathematical circles, the concept of the “Erdős number” has been introduced, in honour of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, measuring the “collaborative distance” of a person away from Erdős through links by co-author. Similar metrics have been proposed in other fields, including acting. The possibility of exploring and visualising such links in arts fields is proposed in this paper.