The Relevance of Anthropology and Social Science

When people are studying Anthropology, they often wonder how close anthropology and social science are related. Today, I am going to investigate on this topic by analyzing the relationship between them by using YouTube video frequency distributions.

First of all, I found 2 representative channels on YouTube, each represent one subject. For anthropology, I chose the official channel of American Anthropological Association (AAA). As for social science, I chose the most subscribed social science channel, Social Science of University of Amsterdam. The following are the 2 channels:

Secondly, I used web scraper to scrape down the links of the videos that appeared in the channels and the recommended videos for each video.

ss&anthro

.csv

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Then, using Gephi to carry out the social network analysis. By analyzing this graph, it clearly shows that there is a strong connection between the Anthropology videos and Social science videos on YouTube. This matches the acknowledged fact that these two are related subjects, and YouTube finds out about this by content-based and collaborative filtering/recommendation system.

The average degree is 1.45 per node. In-degree has a range of 2, and out-degree has a range of 318. Their difference is 316. The average degree indicates the total relevance of each factor to the others. The in-degree measures the number of connections that point into the vertexes, and out-degree measures the number of connections that point outward to the other vertexes.

There are 3 categories, video links related only to anthropology scraped from the channel of American Anthropological Association, video links related only to social science scraped from the channel of Social science of Uni Amsterdam, and videos related to both of them.

By calculating, there are 172 nodes out of 318 nodes that are connected to both nodes, AAA and Social Science of Uni Amsterdam. The percentage relevance is therefore very clear: 172/318 = 54%

Generally speaking, the relevance of these 2 subjects are relatively high, comparing to other analysis stats such as the left-wing and right-wing political party relevance with only around 13%, 54% is much higher.