few days ago we watched a video of the work leading up to the Watson and Crick discovery, some of which put the fruit fly in high school bio books and created the collaborative lab team.

Since I was primed in this way, I found myself constantly reading Watts as a third description of how the scientific enterprise works, through observation; analysis; theorizing; and criticizing, reviving and building on others’ work. And, as Derek points out, Watts himself weaves this constantly as a sub-theme into his discussion by pointing out the inter-disciplinarity of the network theorists. In fact, he brings it to a climax at the close of Chapter 5 by claiming the main point is that the small-world problem shows “how the different disciplines can help each other build the new science of networks” (160), naming off Kochen, Pool, Milgram, White, Bernard, etc.

To bring this fully around, I also noted a number of moments when research communities themselves enter the discussion as examples of social networks. Early on, Watts was trying to get hold of the Scientific Citations database (92), and later Mark Newman provided them with the LANL e-print archive, the pre-publication archive of physics papers (123), as well as the MEDLINE database of 2 million biomedical papers (124). The study of the cross-links of citations, to help define network phenomena in what are really textual worlds, brings us very close to our home world of blogs, comments, and trackbacks as examples of social networks. However, in general, the first five chapters of Watts presented themselves to me as a story of theory-building and methodology, an abstract rationale for things I already feel and intuit about the small worlds I inhabit.