Virtual Fashion - Tracking and Analyzing Cultural Dispersion on the World Wide Web

In the real world, people clothe themselves in garments whose cut and design encodes information about their social identity. This encoding changes temporally as the design spreads throughout a population: this is the basis of "fashion." A similar sense of fashion has emerged on the World Wide Web (WWW), as people embellish their homesites with links, pictures, and other objects that exhibit similar patterns of dispersion. I have developed tools and algorithms for tracking and analyzing this "virtual fashion." The initial approach is to examine a set of selected homesites each week and track the spread of links. By developing a system for collecting and analyzing the data, this research provides both macro and micro readings of the phenomenon of virtual fashion. The system shows what is popular, ways that things are related, and what is emerging online. I also use data collected by the system to think about existing social theories of fashion and see how they may help develop models of virtual fashion. This research helps people further understand how the WWW functions as a social environment. Thesis Supervisor: Judith S. Donath Title: Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences