IV. Identifying the "Closest Associates" of the "Top10"

A. Data

When the reader clicks the following button, Table BB appears in a pop-up window.

  • The reader should ignore the first column (from the left) in Table BB for the moment.

  • The third column contains the official name of each HBCU or service organization, but these names have been sorted by the number of references each HBCU or service organization received from all other HBCUs and service organizations as recorded in Table AA. The number in the second column indicates the sorted position of each Website.

  • The reference numbers recorded in Table AA are repeated in the fourth column of Table BB. The term "Top 10" refers to the Websites that appear in the first 14 rows of this table. (Note: Please see the explanation of why there are 14 Websites in the "Top 10" in the Methodology section of this report)

  • The fifth column contains the number of references that each HBCU or service organization received from the "Top 10". These reference numbers were obtained on 11/19/06 from a customized search that only searched the Websites of the "Top 10".

  • The reader can search the "Top 10" Websites (a/k/a "Primary Nodes") via the following:


    (Note: We provide this intermediate search option here so that the reader can verify the reference numbers that we listed in Table BB. It will not be used in the remainder of this report, nor is it included on the Gateway's customized HBCU Search Page.)

B. Comments

  • The Websites that received the most references from the "Top 10" were identified as their "Closest Associates". But how close is "closest"?
  • First, we calculated the total number of references that the "Top 10" gave to each other. This total = 3158 and appears on the right side of the table next to the 12th row. There being 14 members of the top group, each received an average of 226 references. Accordingly, any other Website that received 226 or more references were designated as a "Closest Associate".
  • We defined the "Core" of the network to include the "Top 10" and their "Closest Associates". The members of this group were assigned "ReferenceRank" = 3, which appears in the first column of Table BB.
  • The 510 references that UNCF received from all HBCUs and service organizations was so far above the second place position that we changed its ReferenceRank to 4.

  • The lowest score that a member of the "Top 10" received from all other HBCUs and service organizations = 306. So we divided the range from 1 to 306 into an upper and lower half. Websites that received 154 or more references from all other Websites were assigned ReferenceRank = 2; those who received less than 154 were assigned ReferenceRank = 1. No Website received zero references, so no Website was assigned ReferenceRank = 0.

  • Finally, we call the reader's attention to a few peculiar Google-oddities that appear in this table. The bottom row shows that the customized search of the Websites of all 109 HBCUs and service organizations returned a total of 17,925 references. We might therefore have expected the customized search of the "Top 10" Websites to return less than 4000 references. Instead, the bottom row shows that 13,855 references were returned -- about three times the expected number. We were, therefore, somewhat less perplexed when we found that a few HBCUs received the same or more references from the "Top 10" than they did from entire 109, e.g., Howard, Morgan, FAMU, Spelman, Norfolk, etc. At the present time we have no explanation for these oddities. Hopefully, Google will enlighten us within the next few weeks. ... :-(