Speaker
Description
It is widely acknowledged today that music scenes or ‘worlds’ can be analysed as social networks. In most published cases this has meant analysing music worlds as networks of the individuals who participate in them, whether as artists, audience members or ‘support personnel’ (e.g. managers or sound engineers). Such ‘participant networks’ are important and their analysis is often useful and revealing. However, music worlds can also be thought of as networks of events (e.g. gigs and festivals) linked by flows of both participants and the culture and resources those participants bring with them. In this paper I reflect, both theoretically and by way of empirical analysis, on such 'event networks' and what they might teach us. Because face-to-face events occur in particular places at particular times, for example, event networks allow and even demand that we attend to the spatio-temporal structure and dynamics of music worlds. Networks of events have obviously been captured and analysed before, often in the context of two-mode studies, and recent work with both line graphs and hypergraphs is relevant for what I will be discussing. However, very little has been said with respect to the sociological significance of ‘event networks’ and, properly considered, they raise interesting methodological questions for SNA which are not widely discussed (e.g. flows can only move forward in time such that reciprocation of ties is impossible and centrality scores (e.g. in and out degree) are affected by position in temporal order). The paper aims to fill this significant gap.
| Topics | • Temporal networks, network dynamics and evolution patterns |
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| Keywords | Cultural Networks, Music, Event Networks, Collective Action, Two-Mode Networks |
