A network analysis of The Pool will be featured at the Leonardo satellite symposium on Arts | Humanities | Complex Networks at the NetSci2010 conference on 10 May in Boston. This conference, held at the lab founded by renowned network theorist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, artists, and scholars to examine old and new media through the lens of network theory.

One of the presentations looks at Dante’s Inferno as a social network. Other presentations include an analysis of Fluxus founder George Maciunas as a net artist and a “network literary criticism” algorithm for greenlighting movie scripts.

John Bell and Jon Ippolito will present an analysis of The Pool that argues that user ratings can be a limiting factor in the “rich-get-richer” dynamic that plagues some recognition networks. This should be good news for underdogs trying to gain mindshare in online communities with built-in ranking systems.