Discussions on Influence Node
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I'm creating my own type for "Students." This is very useful, for example, with philosophers: Davidson and Dennett were students of Quine, Schopenhauer was a student of Fichte, etc.
However, I don't think that the teacher/student relationship deserves a separate type, since the relationship is just a specific type of influence.
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I agree that "students" and "student of" should by properties in an influence node. In the meantime, were is the "student" type that you've created? How do you create new types?
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There's an existing type, Academic, that has properties for advisor/advisee relationships. This help topic describes the process for creating types: Creating New Types with the Schema Editor.
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Amendment: On second though, it actually does make sense to have a separate Student/Teacher Type (aka. Lineage Node) within the Influence Commons base. That Type should have two properties "student of" and "students"
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Thanks jeff. I found the help docs.
I've created a new Lineage Member type, which currently has "student of" and "students" properties. May I suggest adding it to the Influence Commons schema? Here are the sample topics that I've used the type with: http://www.freebase.com/view/user/flyingzumwalt/default_domain/lineage_member
Note: these links might break when I move the type out of my default domain.
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This would be a denormalization, I think -- all Lineage Member data would have to be duplicated on the Influence Node type. Do you have a specific use case in mind for this?
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Pleased to oblige.
Example: The Mahamudra Lineage (Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism)
The Mahamudra Lineage is well defined. Tilopa taught Naropa, who then taught Marpa. Marpa returned to Tibet and taught Milarepa. The lineage then continues and branches - Gampopa, Dusum Khyenpa, etc. and can be traced all the way to living lineage holders today (over 1000 years of oral transmission). The resulting branches of transmission formed the 4 major and 8 lesser lineages of the Kagyu school.
This stuff is important if you want to make sense of any oral tradition, especially when you look at events like the Rimey movement where a few very influential yogis spent their lives rescuing and consolidating dying lineages. The resulting texts, which attempt to preserve the unique flavor of each lineage of instruction, have become some of the most important and most frequently referenced texts in modern Tibetan Buddhism.
In light of that, take a look at Milarepa's influence node. He was influenced by both the Buddha and Marpa. There's no way to distinguish that Marpa & Milarepa had a very significant personal relationship of instruction while the Buddha was simply an influence.
You might be tempted to say that it is sufficient to mark people as contemporaries (either explicitly or by means of birth/death dates). This would fail though. Proof: Anyone using freebase right now has been influenced by Tim Berners-Lee and we are all his contemporaries, but very few of us have actually been his students. There is no way for me to find out who his actual students are. The existing ontology is insufficient. -
PS: For a tangible example, use an app like thinkbase to search for Marpa or Milarepa and look at the "student of" and "students" links vs. influence node connections. Follow the lineage down to Gampopa, who had a lot of important students (this is where many of the separate kagyu schools come from). Again, compare lineage member connections with the influence node connections.
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I think that highlights precisely the issue that Jeff was talking about. Did Gampopa (Thinkbase link) really not "influence" some of his students or did someone just forget to do the redundant data entry (made necessary by the denormalization) in the "influence node" part of the graph?
Having said that, the Academic type that Jeff pointed to has precisely the same problem. Perhaps the Influencer/Influencer link needs to be qualified by type or strength or ...
One of the things of this type that I think it would be cool to be able to include is the Math Genealogy project http://www.genealogy.ams.org/
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I have a use case, though not sure where or how to type it. Any who wants to handle it, go right ahead...
A Tutor (or the previously discussed Student/Teacher relationship) and how they influence (the influence node)...
Person: Darius Ford (Friend of Mark Twain - aka Samuel Clemens) Tutored: Olivia Langdon Clemens (wife of the famous author) While working at Elmira College as Professor of Physical Sciences.
Reference Citation : http://toolsofhistory.cdmhost.com/u?/p261501coll9,29
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I think the "Chef" type is a good general one that should be worked on. I'm going to try building it out a little, then see if we can move it into a commons domain. I might create some associated types while I'm at it, like a CVT for a chef's association with restaurants over time. Kake and I discussed this on IM one time.
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Cool! Would be very nice to do an import of celebrity chefs in general. Might also be interesting to have a signature dish property..
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And don't forget Wikipedia's Chef infobox as a potential data source.
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alexbl: signature dish is a great idea!
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use inShouldn't the chef type the influence node type to specify the chef's influence?
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Alex: yes, probably, though I think I want to talk to Mike Love about it first. I'm crossposting over into the Influence Node domain.
If we use it we should probably take all the properties from Influence Node including peers, etc.
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Yes I agree we should use all the properties.
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This is a completely fascinating and powerful collaborative learning tool, and Mike deserves huge credit for getting the ball rolling.
I'd like to think aloud a bit about 'negative' influences, and see what anyone else thinks on this subject. It seems to me that when we refer to influences in a philosophical context, for example, it's generally assumed that we're talking about positive influences, ie.one or more aspects of a known party-of-the-first point of view that end up being utilised or subsumed or in some other fashion became incorporated into the expressed thought of the party-of-the-second. Correct?
However, negative influences can be equally important, in that critical examination and subsequent rejection on stated or unstated grounds very often plays a vital role in determining the subsequent direction of an influencee's thinking and conclusions. These negative influences can be well known, buried in footnotes, or, sometimes, inferred with some degree of confidence.
So, my question is, do negative influences legitimately belong in Mikes influence type, as conceived by him and as utilized by this type's rapid expansion in use? Or does 'influence' require two explicit types, positive and negative? Any thoughts?
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So in the dataset I first uploaded, I included negative influence as just influence - partly to simplify the project and keep the barrier to entry low enough that it would actually get contributions. There are lots of degrees of influence, but I would err on the side of simplicity so it's easy for people to get going.
I think it's also fair to say David Hume influences Kant, Plato influences Aristotle, or Hegel influences Karl Marx, although the latter in the pair is in many ways rebelling against the core arguments of the former.
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The concepts of 'school' or 'tradition' own a decisive advantage over the concept of influence, as they do not imply a direction of the link.
Infuence implies that a dead person, say Leonardo da Vinci, actively acts on a living person, say Andy Warhol.
In reality the relation points to the past in all cases. Andy Warhol 'refers to' Leonardo da Vinci instead of being activly 'influenced' by the dead artist.
This distinction between 'influence' and different forms of 'refering to' as well as it's implications have been discussed very strikingly by Michael Baxandall in his 'Excursion against Influence', which can be found in his 1985 book 'Patterns of Intention' pp. 58-61.
Functionally the difference between 'influencing' and 'refering to' is equivalent to the difference between 'bibliometric coupling' and 'co-citation' in the field of Bibliometrics. Whereas 'influence' implies a static actor in the past, modern day 'reference' alters our image of the past actor.
A classic example would be 9/11: By refering to films-scenes where high-rise buildings are burning or destroyed, the terrorists changed our perception of films like 'The Fight Club' or 'Die Hard' forever. By 'refering to' the films they changed our perception of the past. On the other hand it would not make sense to sue one of the directors for 'influencing' the terrorists.
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