The Basics

Postings

People who conduct social network analysis (SNA) are often tasked to describe complex methodologies applied to highly connected data and any corresponding results in layman’s terms. This is further compounded by the idea that networks are neither quantitative nor quantitative by design which makes it fairly unique. In fact, to steal a term from Physics, a given network constructed only of data is in methodological superposition, in that until a measurement is taken it is both quantitative and qualitative at the same time and we don’t have to consider if a cat is alive or dead or both. However unlike physics we can get information about both.2

<<<<<<< HEAD In the spirit of visualizations, the purpose of constructing social networks is to picture the complexity of relationships and to convey information about measures taken on those relationships. And that brings us to your first task:

Please create a computer generated or a hand drawn image of the purpose(s) of social network analysis without using any additional explanation or descriptions3 and post it on Slack on the #pictures-of-sna channel.

While there are no right or wrong answers here, submissions that are able to describing the purpose(s) of SNAs visually will earn additional extra credit points that can be used on anything except the final exam. So please try to be creative, put some thought into it and maybe you’ll start the term off with up to five (5) extra credit points! When is the last tine you started a class in the blue, if ever?

Now its your turn in trying to convey a high level idea into something that’s consumable an everyday person; except with networks you are expected to get it done without the need for descriptive text or explanations. Your task is to create a computer generated or a hand drawn image of the purpose(s) of social network analysis without using any additional explanation or descriptions. While there are no right or wrong answers here, submissions that are able to describing the purpose(s) of SNAs visually will earn additional extra credit points that can be used on anything except the final exam. So please try to be creative, put some thought into it and maybe you’ll start the term off with up to five (5) extra credit points! When is the last tine you started a class in the blue, if ever? >>>>>>> 0ef78d8d (edp693g)


  1. You just need to know a little math to distinguish colors without ever seeing them↩︎

  2. Here’s an example that makes me feel old. Remember sentence diagrams? The outcomes from these are social networks and variants now form a basis for many text mining approaches. We’ll actually explore some of these later in the term.↩︎

  3. You can label the network itself with text, but please keep it to a minimum.↩︎