Course description
This is an instrouctory course to the basic concepts in social network analysis, with an emphasis on its application in bibiometrics, knowledge management and digital humanities. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in social network analysis (SNA). SNA techniques have been applied in a wide range of domains. There has been a close affinity between SNA and bibliometrics in LIS where SNA has been used in the study of scholarly collaboration and citation analysis, as a way of tracing the intellectual influences manifested in collaboration and citation behaviors among scholars. Author collaboration network typology has been used to represent the cohesion of a scholar community, co-word network has been used to reveal the intellectual structure and sub-specialties of a domain. In knowledge management, SNA has also been used to assess the typology of social network in an organization, which has been used to measured the social capital of the individuals as well as the organization as whole. With recent popularity of social networking sites, a growing availability of network data also makes it possible to study similarity and relatedness within a network of people, documents, and websites.
This class is designed for advanced undergraduates or graduate students who wish to acquire a basic understanding of SNA, gain first-hand expereince with SNA techniques, and explore the possibility of utilizing SNA for their research.
The class seeks to:
1. provide a survey of the network perspective on a wide range of
models and phenomena such as "the small world", "strong/weak ties", and
network dynamics such as homophily, reciprocity, and preferential
attachment.
2. introduce students to empirical studies utilizing SNA methods in
areas such as scholarly communication/bibliometrics, social capital,
education, and recommendation networks.
3. give students hand-on experiences with collecting and analyzing network data centered on the software
packages UCINET, NetDraw, VosViewer, and Gephi.
Week | Topic and assignments |
Readings |
1 |
Introduction; the network perspecive in social sciences and bibliometrics |
|
2 | Intro to network data UCINET and NetDraw, Gephi, datasets | Borgatti, S. P., A. Mehr, D. J. Brass, G. Labiance, (2009). Network anaysis in social science |
3 |
Data collection; two-mode network ego network How social network predic epidemics |
Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson ( 2018) Ch. 3. Research design, Ch.4. Data collection |
4 |
Graphs | Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson ( 2018) Ch. 2 Mathematical foundations |
5 |
Cohesion, E-I (homophily test) Clustering coefficient |
Hanneman & Riddle,( 2005) Ch. 7.8 |
6 |
Netowrk centrality and centralization; central-periphery structure/coreness How trees talk to each other |
First assignment due (data collection and visualization) Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson ( 2018) Ch. 10. Centrality |
7 | Community-detection (clustering) Girvan Newman Modularity. Louvain method | Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson (2018). Analyzing social networks: Ch. 11 Subgroup, |
8 |
Similarity and structural equivalence |
Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson ( 2018) Ch. 12. Equivalence |
9 |
Social network and Social capital The hiddern influence of social network | Borgatti, S., Jones, B. C., and Everett, M.G.(1998). Network Measures of Social Capital. Connection 21(2). |
10 | Hypotheis testing with networked data Multi-plex networks | Second assignment due (Centality; E-I index) Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson ( 2018) Ch. 8. Testing Hypothesis |
11 | VosViewer demo Bibliometrics and network analysis | Giannakos, M., Papamitsiou, Z., Markopoulos, P., Read, J., & Hourcade, J. P. (2020). Mapping childˇVcomputer interaction research through co-word analysis. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 23, 100165. |
12 |
Bibliometrics and network analysis cont. |
|
13 | Network filtering procedures | Third assignment due (Community-detection, hypothesis testing) Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson (2018). Analyzing social networks: Ch. 14 Large network |
14 |
Netowrk dynamics: small world, preferential attachment | Milgram, Stanley. "The small world problem." Psychology today 2.1 (1967): 60-67 Barabasi (2003) Ch 5, 6, 7 |
15 |
Presentation of your bibliographic network assignment |
Forth assignment due (bibliographic networks) |
16 |
Discussion of your final project |
Aiello, L. M. et al. (2010). Link creation and profile alignment in the aNobii social network |
17 |
Discussion of your final project |
|
18 |
Final presentation |
Final project due |
References