Advanced SNA
Instructor: Steve Borgatti
TAs: Adam Jonas, Theresa Floyd
Overview
This is a 4-day (Mon-Thu) workshop designed for people interested in gaining both a deeper and broader look at network theory and methods. It is assumed that participants are familiar with UCINET and have some knowledge about network concepts.
New this year will be a focus on making the round trip from importing data from Excel, managing it, visualizing it, and exported results back to Excel for import to a stat package. Also, from a software point of view, focusing more on the command line interface rather the menu system.
The workshop has several conceptual goals, including:
Taking a deeper look at what the fundamental charter of network analysis is, characteristic modes of explanation, issues of agency and structure, what is our unique contribution, and so on
Making connections between different network concepts, such as seeing the underlying unity behind families of measures, including those at different levels of analysis, such as measure of cohesion and measures of centrality
Covering more interesting centrality measures than just the big four measures that most workshops have time for, including centrality measures that take into account node attributes
New concepts and methods in network analysis
In addition, the workshop has several methodological and practical goals, including:
Using UCINET more effectively, especially making use of batch processing and powerful command line capabilities. For example, the command line interface makes it possible to do things like:
->net = loadexcel(kracknet.xls) //load excel file and create ucinet file
->draw net //visualize network
->dsp corr(indeg(net),outdeg(net)) //correlate indegree with outdegree
->cent = centrality(net) //compute centrality measures
->holes = holes(net) //compute structural holes measures
->attr = loadexcel(krackattr.xls) //import attributes from Excel
->data = joincols(cent,holes,attr) //combine centrality, structural holes, and attribs into one file
->saveasexcel data mydata.xls //export to excel
Learning the best ways to import data structured in widely varying ways
Deriving the right variable for the research question, including things like measuring change
Integrating network variables and results into a larger study -- i.e., how do you use this stuff to generate knowledge write publishable papers.
Schedule
Slides and exercises can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/advancedmaterials
Monday - Introduction
Big Picture
UCINET refresher
slides:
agenda
introduction
research designs
key concepts
Tuesday - World of Dyads
Relating dyadic data
Combining dyadic data
Dyadic network concepts
Wednesday - World of Nodes
Clustering dyadic data
Testing dyadic hypotheses
Ego networks
Centrality
Thursday - World of Networks
Centrality - cont.
Cohesion and Shape
Materials
Software
Please visit our software page.
Recommended Textbook
Borgatti, SP, Everett, MG & Johnson, JC. 2013. Analyzing Social Networks. Sage: London.
Additional Readings
Datasets