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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ ***** I apologize if this is a hopelessly vague question. I am having a rather hard time articulating it, and know that I have tried to do so with some of you unsuccessfully in the past. I am exploring the utility of the concept of clustering coefficients in analyzing the social connections of an ancient Egyptian village. But the connections I am working with are ones I have derived by running an affiliations function on a two-mode network, thus turning indirect connections (person->legal document->second person) into direct ones. I would like to use the (exceptionally high) clustering coefficient of this derived one-mode network to tell me something about the extent to which this village was ordered at the group level, by guild, by peer-group, etc. But it starts to occur to me that I cannot escape the distorting lense of the (now removed) texts linking person 1 to person 2. In other words, isn't the clustering coefficient in this case nothing but a measure of how much the names in each text overlap? So, in that sense, it tells us nothing about the society's structure itself, and everything about the clustering of the evidence for it. Am I understanding this correctly? Should I despair? Or is the clustering coefficient still an interesting number, even in light of this distorting problem? If so, how? I have looked at Watts _JAS_ 1999 fruitfully, although I am alarmed at the prospect of calling my Egyptians connected cavemen! :) What I think I need next is a way to be sure I'm understanding what I've read, and can put it in appropriately concrete (social, textual, methodological) terms. Thanks for your thoughts! Giovanni Ruffini _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.