ANT 291

Social Network Analysis and Social Media

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    • SNA Examples
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    • Instructor: Fuji Lozada
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20 Feb 2015

Facebook and Social Network Analysis (SNA): Lecture Notes

Online text, introduction to SNA methods: http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/

What is Social Network Analysis?

  • Social networks are a set of ties between actors – but actors can be people, groups, or even concepts
  • Actors are seen as interdependent, not independent, autonomous units
  • Relational ties are flows of resources, material or non-material
  • Network models conceptualize structure (social, economic, political, etc.)
  • Relational ties are primary, attributes secondary

What can be studied using SNA?

  • Social structure – kinship, social resource mobilization
  • Cultural concepts, domains, meaning, information flow
  • Economics: business and work practices, trade networks (commodity chain analysis)
  • Environmental issues
  • Public health – epidemiology
  • Political science – policy, popular opinion, national security
  • Literary analysis and media consumption

Why is SNA important today?

  • Complex interdependence of problems in the social sciences
  • Interconnectedness of people, things, and ideas over vast spaces
  • Networked individualism: Idea of triple revolution: social network, internet, and mobile (Rainey and Wellman)
  • Information and Communications Technology (ICT): Increased visibility of social media has greatly stimulated social network analysis; self-generation of data by users;
  • In academia, connected to rise of “digital humanities” and digital studies; in business and government, the use of “big data” in network analysis

SNA concepts

  • Graph Theory: study of network structure based on pairwise relations between actors
  • Nodes: (also called vertices) – these are the actors
  • Edges: connections between nodes, can be directed or undirected
  • Neighbors – two nodes connected by an edge
  • Social Capital (Putnam) – can be measured by SNA; decline of social capital leads to breakdown of communities
  • Bridging: connections with people who are dissimilar; out-group connections
  • Bonding: connections with people who are similar; in-group cohesiveness
  • Betweenness – (centrality measure) measure of power, connectivity, interface (bridging capital potential)
  • Strength of weak ties (Granovetter); people learn about new opportunities not through close friends but through acquaintances; bridges are manifestations of the strength of weak ties

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