#EL30 Graphing


Week 3 of Stephen Downes’ E-Learning 3.0 course is looking at Graphs.
Stephen recommended some resources for this topic. These included:
Vaidehi Joshi’s (2017) gentle introduction to graph theory. In her discussion of graphs, Vaidehi observes “in mathematics, graphs are a way to formally represent a network, which is basically just a collection of objects that are all interconnected”.  She distinguishes between directed graphs and undirected graphs and explains the ways edges connect nodes in these kind of graphs. An example of the former is Twitter (each edge created represents a one-way relationship), and of the latter Facebook (its edges are unordered pairs).

Vaidehi suggests a number of resources to provide details about graphs, one of them is Jonathan Cohen’s slide show Graph Traversal. He defines a graph as a “general structure for representing positions with an arbitrary connectivity structure” that has a collection of vertices (nodes) and edges (arcs). An edge connects two vertices and makes them adjacent.
A second resource shared by Stephen is Fjodor Van Veen’s (2016) Neural Network Zoo. In his post Fjodor shares a “mostly complete chart of Neural Networks’ and includes a detailed list of references to support his visualisation of the networks.
A third resource continues the visualisation theme. Vishakha Jha (2017) uses this diagram to inform the discussion of machine learning:

A fourth resource recommendation is Graph Data Structure and Algorithms (2017). This article aggregates a large number of links to graph topics. It includes this explanation:

One of the E-Learning 3.0 course members, Aras Bozkurt, exemplified this theme in this tweet and in doing so underscored the skills available within self-organising networks :


It was a great way to end and start conversations about graphs.
Photo Credits
Title image is from Gonçalves B, Coutinho D, Santos S, Lago-Penas C, Jiménez S, Sampaio J (2017) Exploring Team Passing Networks and Player Movement Dynamics in Youth Association Football. PLoS ONE 12(1): e0171156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0171156
Other images are frame grabs for the resources cited in this post.

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