Community Detection of Indigenous Beaders on Instagram involves roots in coding theory and graph theory. Given a data set, the objective is to detect underlying communities within a population. We view the given data set as the output of a noisy communication channel and use decoding techniques to reveal the underlying communities. Essentially, any population of a particular size has a set of allowed possibilities for clusters. Using techniques from coding theory, we hope to unveil a “best fit” community cluster formation from our gathered data. Through a sampling of 50 Indigenous beaders on Instagram, we gather data about Instagram follows to eventually decode to smaller community clusters. We imagine the community clusters could reveal tribal affiliation, stitching techniques, or geographic location.
