Humans make groups as easily as bees make honey. Since the downfall of X/Twitter, academics have flocked (or swarmed, if continuing with the bee analog) to the better pastures of Bluesky. Bluesky’s unique feature of starter packs allows people to create groups on a topic/theme and add people to it. Academics saw this opportunity to make starter packs related to their disciplines, sub-disciplines, sub-sub disciplines and add their fellow academics.

As a multidisciplinary researcher, I have long had a fantasy to see the network of academic discipline. How do various disciplines and fields connect with each other? Are some fields similar to the least common ancestor among other specialized fields? Do certain interdisciplinary fields act as bridges between communities? The questions, fueled by curiosity, are endless.

Bluesky starter packs provided an unprecedented opportunity to study academic disciplines as interconnected networks, thanks to their well-defined memberships. I did what any researcher with curiosities would do: start a side-quest to collect data and analyze it during breaks from the data collection and analysis of the many other main quests.

By combining data scraping, natural language processing to filter academic packs, and mapping members, I created an interactive and searchable network —a network brimming with untold secrets. Here is a link: Interactive Network Visualization with D3.js

Exploring it has been an absolute joy for me, and I hope it sparks the same wonder for you.

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I will continue updating this network as more people flock to Bluesky. And when time allows, I will dig deeper into the network analysis and update.