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fit-fat-cat
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Description: Humans are involved in various real-life networked systems. The most obvious examples are social and collaboration networks but the language and the related mental lexicon they use, or the physical map of their territory can also be interpreted as networks. How do they find paths between endpoints in these networks? How do they obtain information about a foreign networked world they find themselves in, how they build up mental model for it and how well they succeed in using it? Large, open datasets allowing the exploration of such questions are hard to find. Here we report a dataset containing information about the paths used by humans in a network built over the words of the English language. These paths have been collected by a smartphone word game application, in which players navigate between fixed length source and destination words step-by-step by changing only one letter at a time. The paths reflect how the players master their navigation skills in such a foreign networked world. The dataset can be used in the study of human mental models for the world around us, and in a broader scope to investigate the navigation strategies in complex networked systems.