What an entangled Web we weave: An information-centric approach to time-evolving socio-technical systems

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1 School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
2 Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
3 Microsoft Corp, Singapore, Republic of Singapore
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2789v2
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Data Mining and Machine Learning, Data Science, Network Science and Online Social Networks, Social Computing, World Wide Web and Web Science
Keywords
Socio-technical Systems, Information Theory, Temporal Data Mining, Collective Intelligence, Social Machines, Citizen Science, Online Communities, Philosophy, Complexity Science, Network Science
Copyright
© 2018 Luczak-Roesch et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Luczak-Roesch M, O'Hara K, Dinneen JD, Tinati R. 2018. What an entangled Web we weave: An information-centric approach to time-evolving socio-technical systems. PeerJ Preprints 6:e2789v2

Abstract

A new layer of complexity, constituted of networks of information token recurrence, has been identified in socio-technical systems such as the Wikipedia online community and the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The identification of this complexity reveals that our current understanding of the actual structure of those systems, and consequently the structure of the entire World Wide Web, is incomplete. Here we establish the principled foundations and practical advantages of analyzing information diffusion within and across Web systems with Transcendental Information Cascades, and outline resulting directions for future study in the area of socio-technical systems. We also suggest that Transcendental Information Cascades may be applicable to any kind of time-evolving system that can be observed using digital technologies, and that the structures found in such systems consist of properties common to all naturally occurring complex systems.

Author Comment

This is a pre-print of an article published in Minds and Machines. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9478-1