Visualized: A School Day as Data

Brandon Keim:

By putting RFIDs on children and monitoring their interactions over a single day, researchers have produced one of the most detailed analyses ever of the roiling, boiling social free-for-all that is school.

The findings, published August 16 in Public Library of Science One, document the minute-by-minute interactions and locations of 232 children aged 6 to 12 and 10 teachers.

Reconfigured as pulsing network maps and flows of color are the universal experiences of middle school: the between-class rush, playground cliques, snatched hallway conversation and the fifth-graders who are too cool for everyone else.

"We can compare different types of assumptions or modeling with a model that takes into account all interactions," said Alain Barrat, who studies complex networks at the Institute of Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 21, 2011 4:40 AM
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