First Meeting

Yesterday I had my first meeting with Leo Caves and Dan Franks to kickstart the my project.

I went in with the idea that we we're going to be looking at the non-published collaborative network, but Dan threw in the idea of mapping the published network, and adding weight to the graph edges.

This is a really good idea, however, coming from a biology background, I feel that to fulfil this properly I would have to learn a bit more coding that I originally envisaged, and I feel would be more mathematical (which is not my strength, I'm not innumerate - I've only done A Level Physics, not maths!) than biological. However, I would be able to build upon the work done by previous third year project students.

The other option, of harvesting unpublished network data manually (email, speak to people etc...) seemed like it would develop a more diverse skill set in able to pull it off. I'm going to have to speak to social scientists, biologists, psychologists, wed designers, network specialists, and loads of other people to pull this off.

The biggest problem is making sure that I have useful data.

If the questions are too vague, then there will be bias towards how people answer them. The idea is to split the questions into bite-sized chunks where there's no room for interpretation, to allow my dataset to be consistent. Defining words like "collaboration" is hard, when people might consider handing a plasmid/antibody over as collaboration, or a chat over a cup of coffee, or actually working on a exchanging data.

Where does the buck stop? There needs to be discrete, quantifiable data for me to be able to apply graph/network metrics.

We've opened pandora's box (maybe a bad metaphor, I'm not implying that I've let loose terror within YCCSA or the biology department - unless you count my presence here) and there's plenty of discussion and prototyping to be had before I even begin to ask biologists questions.

Next up: Thoughts on designing a survey for scientists.