Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy research

Dominance hierarchies have been studied for almost 100 years. The science of science approach used here provides high-level insight into how the dynamics of dominance hierarchy research have shifted over this long timescale. To summarize these patterns, I extracted publication metadata using a Google Scholar search for the phrase ‘dominance hierarchy’, resulting in over 26 000 publications. I used text mining approaches to assess patterns in three areas: (1) general patterns in publication frequency and rate, (2) dynamics of term usage and (3) term co-occurrence in publications across the history of the field. While the overall number of publications per decade continues to rise, the percent growth rate has fallen in recent years, demonstrating that although there is sustained interest in dominance hierarchies, the field is no longer experiencing the explosive growth it showed in earlier decades. Results from title term co-occurrence networks and community structure show that the different subfields of dominance hierarchy research were most strongly separated early in the field’s history while modern research shows more evidence for cohesion and a lack of distinct term community boundaries. These methods provide a general view of the history of research on dominance hierarchies and can be applied to other fields or search terms to gain broad synthetic insight into patterns of interest, especially in fields with large bodies of literature. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’.

"Do your part: Stay apart": Collective intentionality and collective (in)action in US governor's COVID-19 press conferences

This mixed-methods study examines how political leaders mobilize collective intentionality during the COVID-19 pandemic in nine US States, and how collective intentionality differs across republican and democratic administrations. The results of our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that i) political leaders establish collective intentionality by emphasizing unity, vulnerability, action, and community boundaries; ii) political leaders’ call to collective action clashes with the inaction required by health guidelines; iii) social inequalities received little attention across all states compared to other themes; iv) collective intentionality in democratic administrations is linked to individuals’ agency and actions, suggesting a bottom-up approach. Conversely, in republican administrations individuals’ contributions are downplayed compared to work and state-level action, indicating a top-down approach. This study demonstrates the theoretical and empirical value of collective intentionality in sociological research, and contributes to a better understanding of leadership and prosociality in times of crisis.

Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy research

Dominance hierarchies have been studied for almost 100 years. A science of science approach can help provide high-level insight into how the dynamics of dominance hierarchy research have shifted or been maintained over this long timescale. To summarize these general patterns, I extracted publication metadata using a Google Scholar search of "dominance hierarchy'', resulting in over 26,000 publications. I used text mining approaches to assess patterns in three areas: (1) general patterns in publication frequency and rate, (2) dynamics of term usage, and (3) term co-occurrence in publications across the history of the field. While the overall number of publications per decade continues to rise, the percent growth rate has fallen in recent years, demonstrating that although there is sustained interest in dominance hierarchies, the field is no longer experiencing the explosive growth it showed in earlier decades. Based on term co-occurrence networks and community structure, the different subfields of dominance hierarchy research were most strongly separated early in the field's history while modern research shows more evidence for cohesion and a lack of distinct term community boundaries. These methods provide a general view of the history of research on dominance hierarchies and can be applied to other fields or search terms to gain broad synthetic insight into patterns of interest, especially in fields with large bodies of literature.

Studying information recurrence, gatekeeping, and the role of communities during internet outages in Venezuela

Many authoritarian regimes have taken to censoring internet access in order to stop the spread of misinformation, restrict citizens from discussing certain topics, and prevent mobilization, among other reasons. There are several theories about the effectiveness of censorship. Some suggest that censorship will effectively limit the flow of information, whereas others predict that a backlash will form, resulting in ultimately more discussion about the topic. In this work, we analyze the role of communities and gatekeepers during multiple internet outages in Venezuela in January 2019. First, we measure how critical information (e.g., entities and hashtags) spreads during outages focusing on information recurrence and burstiness within and across language and location communities. We discover that information bursts tend to cross both language and location community boundaries rather than being limited to a single community during several outages. Then we identify users who play central roles and propose a novel method to detect gatekeepers—users who prevent critical information from spreading across communities during outages. We show that bilingual and English-speaking users play more central roles compared to Spanish-speaking users, but users inside and outside Venezuela have similar distribution of centrality. Finally, we measure the differences in social network structure before and after each outage event and discuss its effect on how information spreads. We find that with each outage event social connections tend to get less connected with higher mean shortest path, indicating that the effect of censorship makes it harder for information to spread.

Publishing a Research Article: A Dialogue between the Author and the Journal

The paper addresses concerns of preparing the research article for publication in a high-ranking international journal. The paper argues how to develop the competence which is required for successful manuscript submission in the international peer-review journal. The analysis of the reasons for rejecting the manuscript submitted in international journals suggests considering a successful submission through the dialogue between the author and the discourse community of the journal selected for publication. The publication competence of the author is considered as the author’s ability to construct his/her position in the text or authorial voice. Bakhtin’s concept of voice allows interpreting authorial positioning in the dialogue with the discourse community selected for submission. While only the author’s position in the article is intentionally aligned with the epistemological, discursive, and rhetorical boundaries of the discursive community of the journal, the author’s voice may be approved by the community through publication. The approach adopted in the paper is based on Swales’ concept of discourse community and the concept of author’s positioning in academic text suggested by Ivanič. The structure of authorial positioning in the article is developed by using Schmid’s model of the narrative text. The publication competence of the author confirms his/her ability to construct authorial voice, which requires firstly determining the boundaries of the discursive community selected for publication through reading. When the author aligns his/her position in the manuscript with the community boundaries, the author’s voice is addressed to the selected community and it is able to convince the community in the validity of the researcher’s results. In conclusion, the structure of authorial positioning in the research paper is suggested for designing the curriculum of academic writing for publication purposes (ERPP) which aims at successful interactions between the author and the journal community at all stages of manuscript elaboration.

A Node Similarity and Community Link Strength-Based Community Discovery Algorithm

Community structure is one of the common characteristics of complex networks. In the practical work, we have noted that every node and its most similar node tend to be assigned to the same community and that two communities are often merged together if there exist relatively more edges between them. Inspired by these observations, we present a community-detection method named NSCLS in this paper. Firstly, we calculate the similarities between any node and its first- and second-order neighbors in a novel way and then extract the initial communities from the network by allocating every node and its most similar node to the same community. In this procedure, some nodes located at the community boundaries might be classified in the incorrect communities. To make a redemption, we adjust their community affiliations by reclassifying each of them into the community in which most of its neighbors have been. After that, there might exist relatively larger number of edges between some communities. Therefore, we consider to merge such communities to improve the quality of the final community structure further. To this end, we calculate the link strength between communities and merge some densely connected communities based on this index. We evaluate NSCLS on both some synthetic networks and some real-world networks and show that it can detect high-quality community structures from various networks, and its results are much better than the counterparts of comparison algorithms.

Functional brain network community structure in childhood: Unfinished territories and fuzzy boundaries

Adult cortex is organized into distributed functional communities. Yet, little is known about community architecture in childhood. Here, we address this gap by studying the community structure of cortex in 670 children aged 9-11 years from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study. Using fMRI, we first applied a data-driven partitioning algorithm to assign regions to communities, then used a model-based algorithm to further probe community interactions. Children showed similar community structure to adults in early-developing sensory and motor communities. Differences emerged in transmodal areas, manifesting in expanded limbic territory and more flexible interactions between association regions in children relative to adults. The greatest uncertainty in algorithmic assignment was localized to areas supporting attention, indicating complex undifferentiated connectivity patterns in these regions. Collectively, our findings suggest that community boundaries are not solidified in middle childhood, an instability that provides important context for children’s thoughts and behaviors during this period.

Education for Citizenship in the Latin American Context

The chapter shows the situation of education for democratic citizenship in Latin America and its evolution over the last 25 years, taking as an example three countries: Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. First, the concept of citizenship in curricula is analyzed. Its role in the political and social re-democratization and its limitations are proposed as a result of a national identity concept that limits cultural, social, and political diversity. Their strengths and weaknesses are compared, considering issues like human rights, citizenship responsibilities, citizen participation, community boundaries, levels of identity, and cultural diversity. Second, the purposes of their teaching are interpreted in the curricula. It presents a curriculum focused on relevant social problems and on the formation of critical thinking and social participation and citizenship awareness. Finally, it reflects on the results of the international study on civic and citizen education in Latin America, pointing out its contradictions and the need to continue deepening in research and in teaching practice and training.

Co-producing artistic approaches to social cohesion

This paper examines the potential of co-produced arts-based methodologies through the lens of a social cohesion project, from the perspectives of five artists. Arts methodologies can be useful in working across different disciplines and across university and community boundaries to create equitable knowledge production processes. The ways in which art is used in community settings as a mode of collaboration are explored, using the reflections from five artists who were involved in the social cohesion project together. This paper argues that co-producing artistic approaches to social cohesion is a complex, multilayered and sometimes fragile process, but that recognizing and discussing understandings of the role of power and voice within co-produced projects enables effective team communication.