UKY Seminar on Animal Social Networks
Post date: Oct 25, 2012 6:10:50 PM
Bio 770 - Section OO3: Graduate Seminar
Exploring Animal Social Networks
Spring Semester 2013
Tentatively Tuesdays 2:00-3:50pm (TBD)
Sidebar: I'm trying to officially schedule the "small animal lab" as our room, but UK has for some reason taken down its calendars.uky.edu room scheduling page, so it's not yet official.
Instructor: Craig Sargent, Office: 115-116, MDR#3.
Contact Information:
Telephone: 859-257-8742,
e-mail: csargent@email.uky.edu,
www: http://darwin.uky.edu/~sargent/
Textbook: Readings will be mostly from the following textbook..,
...plus selected research papers from the primary literature.
Author Websites: Darren Croft, Richard James, Jens Krause
World Wide Web: http://darwin.uky.edu/~sargent/Bio 770/770SocNet.html
Course Description: This seminar will focus on using social network theory to analyze animal social networks, from a "how to" point of view. In particular, this textbook and seminar emphasizes social networks where animals' individual identities are known, and where we have information on pairwise interactions among individuals. Emphasis is placed on what valuable new insights social network theory gives us above and beyond simply studying individual behavior or two-way interactions. We will explore actual datasets with analytical and graphical software (see below).
Class Meetings: Class time will consist of a combination of discussion of the readings from the book and the primary literature, along with some hands on experience at the computer with real data.
Tentative Schedule:
Software:
UCINET: A comprehensive software package for the analysis of social networks (Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G. and Freeman, L.C. 2002). A trial version can be downloaded here, which includes NetDraw (see below). Steve Borgatti has generously given us a license code to register these copies, and this registration code can be obtained from your instructor.
NetDraw: A free program for visualizing social network data in 2D space.
SocProg: A series of MATLAB programs by Hal Whitehead for analyzing social structure, population structure and movement patterns of identified individuals. Runs under MATLAB, and there is a stand alone version available as well.
PopTools: PopTools is a free add-in for Microsoft Excel for studying matrix population models, simulation of stochastic processes, and calculation of Monte Carlo and bootstrap statistics.