Project

Virtual Fashion: Cultural Dispersion on the World Wide Web

In the real world, people clothe themselves in garments whose cut and design encodes information about the social identity of the wearer. This encoding changes temporally as the design spreads throughout a population; this is the basis of the cultural phenomenon known as "fashion." On the Web, people embellish their homepages with links, pictures and other items that exhibit similar patterns of dispersion. We are developing tools to track, analyze and visualize these patterns; our goal with this research is to further understanding of how the Web functions as a social environment.