Diffusion dynamics of influence in a social network of intellectuals

Abstract

AbstractThe history of intellectuals consists of a complex web of influences and interconnections of philosophers, scientists, writers, their work, and ideas. To understand how did these influences evolve over time, we mined a network of influence of over 12,500 intellectuals, enriched it with a temporal dimension dividing the history into six eras. We analyze time-sliced projections of the network into within-era, inter-era, and accumulated-era networks, and identify various patterns of intellectuals and eras and studied their development in time. We also construct influence cascades, analyze their properties: size, depth and breadth, and analyze how the cascades of influence evolve over the consecutive eras. We find out that the cascades are clustered into two categories, namely small- and large cascades. An interesting finding here is that the fraction of small cascades increases, while the fraction of larges cascades decreases over time. We also briefly analyze the community structure within the influence network of scholars.