Network Literacy

Winter Electives

Mentor : Liubov T. Bauer

The elective aimed at understanding networking through a dataset and exploring the data analysis for urbanism, creating a data science project. The course was structured around the topic of network literacy and its applications in urbanism and architecture. We studied networks of different cities and of different topics and their effect on urbanism and architecture. We were then introduced to the structure and the evolution of the networks behind each system and the common set of fundamental laws and principles which drives it.

We learned two basic network parameters :Number of nodes and Number of links where number of nodes represent the number of components in a system while number of links represent the total number of interactions between the nodes.

We understood how these components interact with one another and hence constitute the network system .Further ahead, we could understand any network if these parameters were defined and hence get an overall understanding about that complex system.

We learned how to represent a network as a graph by learning the “graph theory “.

To begin the process of our projects we asked a research question responding to the city. We were given a set of ideas on the project which we could anchor to or have an open project with a different topic.

Further, we navigated through various software like Kepler , open street maps, google colab,data hubs and secondary data sources to create a dataset.

Network Question :

Preparing a phenolic database of all species of tree in Thane.

From the dataset we learnt and understood how to create different types of networks and how to analyze them for deeper understanding of the data acquired.

It was a learning curve to look at analysis through a lens of networking and get a broader understanding of how to read various aspects of networks like centrality, betweenness, density and degrees of connection, which helped to unearth better Spatial nuances in architecture and urbanism.

https://github.com/Liyubov/networks_urbanism_course/

Github link for sources