Analyzing online communication from a social network point of view: questions, problems, perspectives

This programmatic paper investigates the possibilities, chances, and risks of analyzing personal and professional online communication from the point of view of interactional sociolinguistics combined with modern social network analysis (SNA). Thus, it has two complementing goals: One is the exploration of adequate, innovative concepts and methods for analyzing online communication, the other is to use online communication and its ontological and functional specificities to enrich the conceptual and methodological background of SNA. The paper is organized in two parts. It begins with an introduction to recent developments in sociolinguistic social network analysis. Here, three interesting new concepts and tools are discussed: latent versus emergent networks (Watts 1991), coalitions (Fitzmaurice 2000a, Fitzmaurice 2000b), and communities of practice (Wenger 1998

Simbrain: A visual framework for neural network analysis and education

Simbrain is a visually-oriented framework for building and analyzing neural networks. It emphasizes the analysis of networks which control agents embedded in virtual environments, and visualization of the structures which occur in the high dimensional state spaces of these networks. The program was originally intended to facilitate analysis of representational processes in embodied agents, however it is also well suited to teaching neural networks concepts to a broader audience than is traditional for neural networks courses. Simbrain was used to teach a course at a new university, UC Merced, in its inaugural year. Experiences from the course and sample lessons are provided.