Last night I drifted off to sleep thinking about scientists and online collaboration. I’ve been thinking about these things as I drift off to sleep much more frequently than usual since I read the chapter on “social information foraging” in Peter Pirolli’s Information Foraging Theory. In said chapter, Pirolli describes a number of studies of trends in large groups of specialists working towards a common set of goals, and the degree to which such communities of specialists collectively aid their individual members in making contributions to meeting said goals. The subjects explored within a few of these studies that really caught my eye were the use of co-citation analysis to visualize a field of study or network of specialists, and, as Pirolli puts it, the “brokerage of structural holes” in these networks. The former of these I was familiar with, as the technique’s been pretty well explored from a variety of angles, but I had never seen the latter presented the way in which Pirolli does.