Networks of co-purchase books shows partisan difference in reading
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0079?error=database_circuit_open&error_description=Database%20is%20temporarily%20unavailable
When shopping online, there is usually a display of other products that are co-purchased by those who have previously bought the listed item. This article took full advantage of the co-purchase data of books to rate the political orientation of seemingly apolitical disciplines (such as natural sciences.) To be specific, the political relevance of a subject is measured by the fraction of co-purchases that are political books, and its political alignment is measured by the fraction of red books among those political books co-purchases. Results show that people who purchase liberal books prefer basic sciences while those who purchase conservative books prefer applied and commercial sciences.
While this application of network studies is a little different from what we have seen in our class, I think this is helpful for expanding our visions of how networks can be used to reveal important aspects of our society. This article also utilizes the important assumption that nodes that are connected must share more similarities than unconnected ones. We can really see that networks are ubiquitous in our life. They are not just limited to people. For example, we can also use the number of flights per year to graph the connectivity among major cities in the world.