By Hutton Marshall, Staff Writer
Consider the global impact of the church in Gainesville, Fla. hosting an “International Burn a Koran Day.” Local news covered the event which, in turn, was picked up by national news sources, spreading to highly populated areas across the country.
This news was quickly drawn to areas with dense concentrations of hate groups that vocalized their support of the burning the Koran.
Word of this movement eventually became known to extremist groups in the Middle East that threatened violent retaliation.
The spread of information, is what the Mapping Cyberspace project seeks to track and analyze, deciphering why the information traveled to the locations it did instead of others. The path this information traveled can be observed and studied by the literal mapping of cyberspace. The technology not only reveals where the information is going, but when and how fast the information spreads.
San Diego State political science professor and project researcher, Dr. Dipak Gupta, gives an example of a possible application through studying what makes a susceptible Jihadi website. This would be done by analyzing the language of known Jihadi websites, noting patterns in vocabulary and recurring phrases, and commonly cited religious texts. By doing this, a formula can be created to determine and rate the susceptibility of any potential Jihadi website. A computer program is created which uses the formula to automatically analyze all potential Jihadi websites before organizing them on a spreadsheet by order of susceptibility. The websites are matched by their origins to locations on a map. However, this mapping of the data is only the first step of this research.
The multidisciplinary team behind the research, which consists of five professors coming from geography, political science, linguistics and communications departments, has extensive knowledge in analyzing the causation of these trends found in the movement of data.
This analysis will look at why information reaches certain cities or countries before their neighbors. It can then go back to look at what characteristics were inherent in the information displayed which would draw it to the area. For instance, information about a new means of cheese production would most likely travel throughout Wisconsin more than its neighboring states, just as news of a newly forming hurricane would be more distributed along costal areas.
This can be applied to the study of a new product’s ability to spread through a global market or what areas news tends to travel to the fastest. It can even map the path of a spreading disease by analyzing online activity. All of this amounts to a study of the interconnectedness of a rapidly globalizing society.
“My strategy is to use geography, spatial location, as a key to reveal the relationship among different objects,” Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou, the project leader said.
Tsou hopes this project, by showing the connections between different parts of the globe, will create a mutual understanding and respect between cultures often viewed as too different to coexist peacefully. He hopes this research will reduce conflicts caused by misunderstandings.
“The goal of this research is to better understand what we call the collective thinking of the human being,” he said.
Tsou said this “collective thinking” contained on the Web is something we all contribute to.
“Today, you are sending your thinking for free. When you post on Facebook or a blog, you are releasing your thinking onto the Internet,” he said.
The project, which officially commenced Oct. 1, is still in its earliest stage of data analysis, but there is a seemingly endless amount of study to be done. While the team currently consists of only 10 members, Dr. Tsou stated he will be accepting applications for paid undergraduate assistance, and that he will release official details about the positions in the near future.
