This is the first conference I’ve been to that makes me feel old. That’s not because I’m getting older while grad students stay the same age. It’s because much of the research deals with phenomena – Facebook! MySpace! iPhones! – that until now I’ve been more than happy to let pass me by. I’m used to feeling baffled in conference presentations, but not fusty; it’s like being at a symposium on High School Musical.

But, of course, network science’s bleeding-edgeness is what’s brought me here (to NetSci 08 in Norwich). This is a discipline that didn’t exist 20 years ago, and which is driven in large part by the digitization of everyday life, creating hard yet juicy data on our social lives the likes of which has never existed before.

Today’s theme was ‘Network theory and its applications to health and society’. Someone, can’t remember who, once said that anything that calls itself a science, isn’t. So: social science, political science – not. Biology, physics – are. But network, um, science is starting to make the social sciences more like the natural sciences (not everyone will think that a good thing, of course), thanks to its vast amounts of data, coupled with the solid mathematical foundations. Network maven Duncan Watts – formerly of Columbia, now Yahoo!’s head of social science – calls it Social Science 2.0.

Another thing that struck me was that network science lends itself to intuitive visual representations of complex ideas. You’d hope that would help get these ideas to policy-makers and the public. A case in point was a talk by Martin Newman at Michigan, on how you map social information onto real-world geography using cartograms (cool pictures here). Newman showed how this way of turning data into space can let you see whether, say, New York has more lung cancer than you’d expect, given its population (it doesn’t), or Los Angeles more murders (it does).

Network studies are touching just about every discipline, because you can say general things about networks regardless of the players. They could be enzymes, genes, species in a food web, nerve cells, patients or their diseases, companies, politicians or countries. Plus the whole hard-core theoretical side of the discipline brings in the mathematicians, computer scientists and statisticial physicists. Besides being the hippest meeting I’ve been to, it’s also the broadest. Tomorrow’s theme is ‘Planet Earth and it’s Life’. Check back here to see what happens.

This is the first conference I’ve been to that makes me feel old. That’s not because I’m getting older while grad students stay the same age. It’s because much of the research deals with phenomena – Facebook! MySpace! iPhones! – that until now I’ve been more than happy to let pass me by. I’m used to feeling baffled in conference presentations, but not fusty; it’s like being at a symposium on High School Musical.

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