Hip+Hop+Networks+Lesson

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**Author & Date**: Tom Hayden 12/9/2010


 * Topic/Concept: ** Network Science & Hip Hop Artists - "The Science of Snoop Dogg"

**Type of Activity**: Interactive?


 * Prerequisite knowledge: **Ideas about what a "network" is and how to draw a network.


 * Materials Needed: **Blackboard or whiteboard. It helps to have a list of the top 40 artists or something, so you know who the students are talking about.

**Learning Goals**: The very high level learning goals are:
 * Introduce students to the idea of abstraction and mathematical representation, although we won’t call it that. When we construct a social network, by hand, students should observe how we are using symbols (nodes and edges) as an abstraction of people and relationships. This is not mathematical in the algebraic sense, however this is essentially the foundations of graph theory, a major field of study in computer science and mathematics.
 * Introduce students to the notion of friend-of-a-friend. What does it mean to be the friend-of-a-friend of someone? If x is linked with y and y is linked with z what does that imply about the relationship between x and z? Moreover, we want students to think about basic combinatorics - If you have n friends and those n friends each have n friends, how big is your friend-of-a-friend network? How does this connect to notions of privacy in social networks?
 * Have students think about measures of distance in networks. Your friend may be 1 hop away and friends-of-friends 2 hops. What about people that are 3,4...,n hops away? Research has shown repeatedly that many human networks can be modeled with a maximum distance of 6 hops (or if you know Kevin Bacon, 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon)
 * Have students conjecture and consider the meaning of various structural features of a network. What does it mean to be located centrally in a network? What information/data can we obtain by looking at a graph - what does it mean if we observe clusters in our network?

**Common Misconceptions**: There are a few general misconceptions about networks. First, that being in the middle of the network means that you're the most important person. Is this always true? Often times, it is true: the most connected people are often capable of navigating through social interactions the easiest. However, there are many cases where just being connected to people that already have some outside property (such as being rich) are more important. I'm not sure that this lesson will disprove this, however perhaps it will make the students think about the complex interactions of people (and artists).

The first step of the process is to ask the students the following guided questions:
 * <span style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Detailed Description of Activity: **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Have you ever heard of the word networks? In what context have you heard this? Hopefully, you’ll get responses like “I’ve heard of the movie: The Social Network” or “I plug my computer into a network” (or something along those lines) Perhaps write on the board the examples given. You can guide them to other examples of networks: { Traffic Networks, The Internet, Social Networking, Facebook, Biological Networks }
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ask the students how they usually see networks represented - or if this is too advanced, guide them into representing a network. Here, we can pull out a copy of the top 40 list or start asking the students the following:
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Name a popular song with more than 1 artist. (hip-hop should be full of many examples of this). What do you think it means for artists to work together - does it imply that they have some kind of relationship - e.g. they’re friends?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Using the Top 40 list, you can quickly construct a component that looks like this using two songs.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">You can ask a question like “What if Drake wants to make a record with Keri Hilson - who should he call to get in contact with her?” The students may actually be able to flesh out the above network more if they are familiar with the artists. Hopefully, this should be the fun part of the lesson!! If the students are very familiar with the artists, you may be able to construct a quite large network on the board.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Perhaps as you are generating this, some interesting network signatures might occur. For example, if you detect some clustering of artists - you can ask the students “Why do you think this group over here is clustered together” - have them conjecture. You can suggest things like: record labels, connections to famous rappers, geographic location (east coast, west coast, south), television shows, other media.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">As you construct the network, you will hopefully find some nodes to be really highly connected. For example, in the above network we could continue to flush it out in a way that Drake is extremely highly connected. You can have the students conjecture: We observe that x is highly connected - what do you think that means? What are the reasons for this? Is he just a popular guy or is there something else going on? Have the students throw out hypotheses. Note that some of these may not be immediately testable hypotheses (But this is what researchers do!)
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Point out what it means to be a friend-of-a-friend.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Once you’ve exhausted some of the interactive portion of the lesson, you can pull up Reginald Smith’s Hip-Hop dataset
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">You should be able to give statistics for Snoop Dogg. How many “friends” does he have? How many friends-of-friends does he have?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Finally, we can give the students a handout with instructions for those who use Facebook to access their own social network, along with a general list of guiding questions, such as:
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Observe whether there are clusters of people in your network. What do you hypothesize the various clusters represent? How can we test this hypothesis?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">See who the people in the very center of your network are. Why do you hypothesize that they are in the center?

<span style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">**Assessment**: n/a


 * <span style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Associated files and images: (If you have webspace of your own, please post these additional files/images to that webspace, so that you can just link to them through the GK12 wiki) **


 * <span style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Additional Comments/Suggestions: **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">References
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Smith, Reginald D. “The Network of Collaboration Among Rappers and its Community Structure”. Journal of Statistical Mechanics. 2006. Available at: []