COM 360—Social Network Analysis

Terrorist networks, telecommunication networks, computer networks, Facebook friends, Twitter followers–it seems that everywhere one looks, one finds networks. Fundamentally, a network consists of a collection of actors and the connections amongst them. Often the actors are individuals, but they can also be web pages, research articles, organizations, and nation states. Each of us is embedded in a multitude of networks, connected to others by cultures, social relationships, and communication technologies. Social Network Analysis is a collection of methods for analyzing these relational structures. The emphasis is not on the attributes of the actors, but rather on the pattern of their connections. Actors are defined not so much by their individual characteristics as they are by how they are related to others. Focused as it is on the nature of the connections rather than the nature of the actors, network analysis is a perspective that cuts across the social, behavioral, and natural sciences. It is one of the few truly interdisciplinary paradigms available today