Do you have an Erdős number?
April 21st, 2008 by Andrew Jenks
Analytics and social links are becoming very popular in e-discovery. Certain tools claim to be able to provide you with the number of links between two people in a document collection. Does this help? Can you find what you’re looking for faster? Maybe, but I don’t believe it is the magic bullet that will make other methods obsolete.
You may have heard of the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the real game started with a Hungarian Mathematician named Paul Erdős. Colleagues of Erdős referred to an Erdős Number to describe the “collaborative distance” between an author of a mathematical paper and Erdős himself. This study has lead to some very interesting models of graph theory, namely “social connectedness”. Within infinite communities, even the entire web, you will find that individuals are closely connected. The average Erdős number for any self respecting Mathematician is 4.65, which means that a majority of published Math authors are within 5 degrees of Erdős. I once had a Professor with an Erdős number of 2 and even Bill Gates has an Erdős number of 4. What does this mean from an e-discovery perspective? Well simply that clustering around people is an interesting concept, however in homogeneous document collections you’ll most likely find that everyone is closely connected to everyone else regardless of significance.
Think about your company, or firm’s, email. I bet you have a very close degree of distance between you and somebody who may be in a different office altogether. While I believe that using social networking features in e-discovery is a step in the right direction, based on the connectedness of any organization, we may just be adding a neat “wiz-bang” graphical feature that does not really tell you something you don’t already know. I believe that there are applications of social networks in e-discovery, but telling me that Person X is connected to Person Y through Person Z doesn’t give me anything. I could have looked at the org chart and determined the same thing without spending a ton of time and money. I think this is going to be an important feature set in the future, but for now I think I’ll pass.
