See you in the Funny Papers: Cartoons and Social Networks

Abstract

From time to time a branch of science captures the imagination of the public; it gets "hot. " When that happens, references to the "hot " item appear in newspapers, in novels, in movies-- even in cartoons. Forty odd years ago, for example, Ray Birdwhistell (1952) first introduced kinesics, the field concerned with the importance of non-verbal gestures in human communication. Very soon, Al Capp introduced a new character in his comic strip, Li'l Abner. Capp began a series of based on the activities of a "Professor Fleasong, " a specialist in the study of "toe gestures." The field of social network analysis seems to be in that kind of center-stage position today. The fact that social networks is "hot " is indicated by its increasingly frequent appearance in the popular media, particularly in the comics. And, interestingly enough, many of those treatments are quite sophisti-cated. They refer, not just to the network idea, but they often reflect some of the more subtle and sophisticated ideas from our field--and they do it with wit.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.