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Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Rosa Cintrón. Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-371).

Environment and Planning B (forthcoming) / To be published in Environment and Planning B (2007; forthcoming). Abstract: The citation impact of Environment and Planning B can be visualized using its citation relations with journals in its environment as the links of a network. The size of the nodes is varied in correspondence to the relative citation impact in this environment. Additionally, one can correct for the effect of within-journal â selfâ -citations. The network can be partitioned and clustered using algorithms from social network analysis. After transposing the matrix in terms of rows and columns, the citing patterns can be mapped analogously. Citing patterns reflect the activity of the community of authors who publish in the journal, while being cited indicates reception. Environment and Planning B is cited across the interface between the social sciences and the natural sciences, but its authors cite almost exclusively from the domain of the Social Science Citation Index.

Networks of communication evolve in terms of reflexive exchanges. The codification of these reflections in language, that is, at the social level, can be considered as the operating system of society. Under sociologically specifiable conditions, the discursive reconstructions can be expected to make the systems under reflection increasingly knowledge-intensive. This sociological theory of communication is founded in a tradition that includes Giddens' (1979) structuration theory, Habermas' (1981) theory of communicative action, and Luhmann's (1984) proposal to consider social systems as self-organizing. The study also elaborates on Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication for the formalization and operationalization of the non-linear dynamics. The development of scientific communications can be studied using citation analysis. The exchange media at the interfaces of knowledge production provide us with the evolutionary model of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. The construction of the European Information Society can then be analyzed in terms of interacting networks of communication. The issues of sustainable development and the expectation of social change are discussed in relation to the possibility of a general theory of communication.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology [JASIST] (forthcoming) / To be published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 57(12) (2006) 1616-1628. Abstract: Co-occurrence matrices, such as co-citation, co-word, and co-link matrices, have been used widely in the information sciences. However, confusion and controversy have hindered the proper statistical analysis of this data. The underlying problem, in our opinion, involved understanding the nature of various types of matrices. This paper discusses the difference between a symmetrical co-citation matrix and an asymmetrical citation matrix as well as the appropriate statistical techniques that can be applied to each of these matrices, respectively. Similarity measures (like the Pearson correlation coefficient or the cosine) should not be applied to the symmetrical co-citation matrix, but can be applied to the asymmetrical citation matrix to derive the proximity matrix. The argument is illustrated with examples. The study then extends the application of co-occurrence matrices to the Web environment where the nature of the available data and thus data collection methods are different from those of traditional databases such as the Science Citation Index. A set of data collected with the Google Scholar search engine is analyzed using both the traditional methods of multivariate analysis and the new visualization software Pajek that is based on social network analysis and graph theory.

New Media & Society, 8(6), 2006 (forthcoming). / To be published in New Media & Society, 8(6), 2006 (forthcoming). Abstract: Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these â date stampsâ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engineâ s crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-84).