Welcome to my Social Networks blog

In this blog, you’ll find information on social network (SN) courses I have taught or am planning to teach, as well as infomation on and discussions about current issues in SN and Web 2.0.

Enjoy

List of SN/SNA Courses

Here’s a link to a spreadsheet list of undergraduate and graduate courses on social networks and social network analysis that I compiled in the fall of 2010.  I don’t intend to update it, but hopefully someone from the INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysts) will post it on their website and allow people to add and amend courses.

The short answer:  91 courses (that I could find) and growing.

Social Network Courses as of October 2010

Know who Leonard Kleinrock is?

I didn’t recognize the name before I read Rory O’Connor’s birthday tribute to him.  We all owe him a present.  You can find out why here

Is Network Analysis Overused?

Barry Wellman has posted an interesting article to the INSNA list serve.  In a post to ScientificBlogging, Michael White says that the vast number of computational models coming out of network analysis in the hard and social sciences are being accepted without the ‘real-world’ empirical tests that are necessary for rigorous scientific proof.

Read it here

Are the Democrats atomised?

Interest Groups by Party Affiliation - by Matt Grossmann and Casey Dominguez

Interesting post by two SN researchers.  While interest groups may unite along party lines during elections, they form wider coalitions when they want legislation passed.  One interesting by-product of this work is that the Democratic party is not fragmented into small groups;  in fact, its campaign and coalition networks are denser than the Republican ones,

Click on image to enlarge network map. To see the post and read the paper, click here.

Companies are beginning to learn how…

to understand and to leverage the online relationships of both their customers and their employees.  See article in Business Week  here (Thanks to Valdis Krebs for spotting this)

YouTube, Facebook, and the 2008 US Elections

This paper was presented by Scott Robertson of the University of Hawaii at  a conference at the University of Massachusetts in April, 2009:  YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the US:  http://youtubeandthe2008election.jitp2.net/frontpage

It’s one of the first studies of the interplay between social networks, links,  and visual media in elections, the complexity of which is captured in this slide that depicts the blue/red political divide in the US blogoshphere.

More to come, no doubt, as the analytical tools develop.  The PowerPoint is linked below; you can also download this and other papers from the conference.

Scott Robertson Powerpoint

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HHL SN course review from VDI Nachrichten, 9th March 2009

Click on link to open PDF version of the review

obj1144_mba-1-09

Word image of a blog

This is an image created of the blog from my HHL social networks course on wordle.net (Click to enlarge)

Men, women, primates, and the Dunbar number

Very interesting article in The Economist about the size of social networks

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13176775&fsrc=nwlptwfree

Do you gnow Gnovis?

Check out this interesting blog and peer-reviewed online journal of “Communications, Culture & Technology”  from Georgetown

http://gnovisjournal.org/