OverviewNotions of community quality underlie the clustering of networks. While studies surrounding network clustering are increasingly common, a precise understanding of the realtionship between different cluster quality metrics is unknown. In this paper, we examine the relationship between stand-alone cluster quality metrics and information recovery metrics through a rigorous analysis of four widely-used network clustering algorithms—Louvain, Infomap, label propagation, and smart local moving. We consider the stand-alone quality metrics of modularity, conductance, and coverage, and we consider the information recovery metrics of adjusted Rand score, normalized mutual information, and a variant of normalized mutual information used in previous work. Our study includes both synthetic graphs and empirical data sets of sizes varying from 1,000 to 1,000,000 nodes.Cluster Quality MetricsWe find significant differences among the results of the different cluster quality metrics. For example, clustering algorithms can return a value of 0.4 out of 1 on modularity but score 0 out of 1 on information recovery. We find conductance, though imperfect, to be the stand-alone quality metric that best indicates performance on the information recovery metrics. Additionally, our study shows that the variant of normalized mutual information used in previous work cannot be assumed to differ only slightly from traditional normalized mutual information.Network Clustering AlgorithmsSmart local moving is the overall best performing algorithm in our study, but discrepancies between cluster evaluation metrics prevent us from declaring it an absolutely superior algorithm. Interestingly, Louvain performed better than Infomap in nearly all the tests in our study, contradicting the results of previous work in which Infomap was superior to Louvain. We find that although label propagation performs poorly when clusters are less clearly defined, it scales efficiently and accurately to large graphs with well-defined clusters.

Rapid research progress in science and technology (S&T) and continuously shifting workforce needs exert pressure on each other and on the educational and training systems that link them. Higher education institutions aim to equip new generations of students with skills and expertise relevant to workforce participation for decades to come, but their offerings sometimes misalign with commercial needs and new techniques forged at the frontiers of research. Here, we analyze and visualize the dynamic skill (mis-)alignment between academic push, industry pull, and educational offerings, paying special attention to the rapidly emerging areas of data science and data engineering (DS/DE). The visualizations and computational models presented here can help key decision makers understand the evolving structure of skills so that they can craft educational programs that serve workforce needs. Our study uses millions of publications, course syllabi, and job advertisements published between 2010 and 2016. We show how courses mediate between research and jobs. We also discover responsiveness in the academic, educational, and industrial system in how skill demands from industry are as likely to drive skill attention in research as the converse. Finally, we reveal the increasing importance of uniquely human skills, such as communication, negotiation, and persuasion. These skills are currently underexamined in research and undersupplied through education for the labor market. In an increasingly data-driven economy, the demand for “soft” social skills, like teamwork and communication, increase with greater demand for “hard” technical skills and tools.

This layered account of an inquiry into ‘red’ emerged out of a collective biography workshop. In the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered together to write and make other things and marks on paper that asked questions of, and into, the spaces between words, people, things and their environments. We did not set out to workshop or write into or paint ‘red’ but, rather, it was red that slipped in, uninvited, and painted and wrote us. Red arose as a blush or a stain seeping amongst us that became referenced obliquely by material objects, metaphors and fairytales. The stain spread, became noticeable through our weekend together and beyond it, creating another (bright red artery) vein of connection to write with

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We are members of CANI-Net.1 Sue Porter was pivotal in our efforts to create and sustain the necessary, loosely fashioned spaces to inquire artfully and collaboratively into our fragile existence on this shared and damaged planet. Then suddenly she died. We were grief-stricken. There was a pause. We reconvened, to honor Sue through the ways of working we had accumulated between us over the past decade. We offer you this glimpse into our collaborative mourning for Sue and her ways of sustaining us (including her delight in the company of rolling hills, crows, cormorants, frilly knickers, and red dogs). We talked together. We wrote together. We ate together. We drank together. We made art together. We laughed a lot. We cried. We were altered by the possibilities of collective mourning—finding new ways to carry on being together. We remembered Sue.

We are members of CANI-Net. Sue Porter was pivotal in our efforts to create and sustain the necessary, loosely fashioned spaces to inquire artfully and collaboratively into our fragile existence on this shared and damaged planet. Then suddenly she died. We were grief-stricken. There was a pause. We reconvened, to honour Sue through the ways of On collaborative writing and editingThere were nine of us involved in producing this text. We came together over a long weekend retreat in Wiltshire. We wrote and we played -drawing, cutting out and printing; activities that Sue had loved. And we remembered Sue, keenly and meaningfully, touching on other losses in our lives.A few months later about half the group were able to meet in Edinburgh, to edit our collection of writing into this paper. We were the 'hard core' editors, spreading the hard copy out in front of us, and armed with scissors and glue sticks. We went in with decisive actions, joining the pieces together with collating material here; slicing sentences away there; and generally guiding readers into the text, differentiating between the original writing 'between the nine' and the editing process 'between the four', with different fonts.After this process the document was returned online to the whole group, and was, quite unusually, accepted 'as is' as the final document. Even the person who had initiated and co-ordinated the 'remembering Sue' project, who had expressed a deep reluctance to 'relinquish' the editing process, had acknowledged that these mo(ve)ments (Davies & Gannon, 2005) and diffractions (Barad, 2007) of place, space and assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004) had given rise to unexpected and greater clarity in our text. Subsequently, another configuration from the original nine came together to perform parts of our text as a reader's theatre performance for a conference and, later still, yet another configuration came together to write the introduction to this paper. This has prompted multi-faceted discussions (still ongoing as we write) to take place amongst us, about how the process of editing the text that you are now reading has been a many-layered, multiply-peopled, geographically and ethically challenging and entangled process.

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Taking Laurel Richardson's concept of a ‘take three words’ workshop onto the social media site Twitter with its discipline of quick 140 character answers to the question ‘What are you doing now?’ proved to be a surprisingly intimate insight into the everyday sociology of the lives of 12 writers living in 21st century Britain.