Subject Research, Course Guides, Documentation: Digital Scholarship: Social Network Analysis

Overview

Network analysis is a means of investigating the connections and relationships between a number of entities. While originally based in mathematical graph theory, the application of network analysis methods has become common across academic disciplines, from English to Biology. Whether mapping the relationships between characters in a novel, to charting protein structures, the modern practice of network analysis is supported by a number of digital tools.

Techniques

Commonly used terms in network analysis include:

Node: the elements of a network that are connected. Also called an actor or a vector.

Edge: a connection, or link, between nodes.

Centrality: a numerical expression of a node's importance, which can be measured in four primary ways:

Degree Centrality: the number of edges connected to a node.
Closeness Centrality: the closeness of the entire network.
Betweenness Centrality: the degree to which a node connects other nodes together.
Eigenvector Centrality: connection to other, well-connected nodes.

Data

Network Data Repository
A collection of ready-to-use network datasets, collected from researchers around the world.
Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection
A curated collection of network datasets from Stanford University.
The Index of Complex Networks (ICON)
A repository of network datasets curated and maintained by Colorado University: Boulder.

Tools

Gephi
A free, open source software for manipulating and visualizing network data, commonly used by humanities scholars.
Cytoscape
Another free software option, Cytoscape has primarily been used in the STEM community for network analysis.
SocNetV
A free, open source option aimed at social network analysis applications.
Python
A commonly-employed programming language for digital scholarship, there are a number of packages for using network data in Python.
R & RStudio
Like Python, R is commonly used in the digital scholarship community, and has a number of packages that can visualize and analyze networks.

Projects

Six Degree of Francis Bacon
A reconstruction on an early modern social network, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.

Readings

The Strength of Weak Ties, Mark Granovetter
One of the foundational works on sociological network theory, which argues for the counter-intuitive importance of the weaker ties in a social network in maintaining the overall network's cohesion and structure.

Schaffer Library LibGuides