Network Analysis Literacy by Katharina Anna Zweig; Universität Heidelberg StaffThis book presents a perspective of network analysis as a tool to find and quantify significant structures in the interaction patterns between different types of entities. Moreover, network analysis provides the basic means to relate these structures to properties of the entities. It has proven itself to be useful for the analysis of biological and social networks, but also for networks describing complex systems in economy, psychology, geography, and various other fields. Today, network analysis packages in the open-source platform R and other open-source software projects enable scientists from all fields to quickly apply network analytic methods to their data sets. Altogether, these applications offer such a wealth of network analytic methods that it can be overwhelming for someone just entering this field. This book provides a road map through this jungle of network analytic methods, offers advice on how to pick the best method for a given network analytic project, and how to avoid common pitfalls. It introduces the methods which are most often used to analyze complex networks, e.g., different global network measures, types of random graph models, centrality indices, and networks motifs. In addition to introducing these methods, the central focus is on network analysis literacy - the competence to decide when to use which of these methods for which type of question. Furthermore, the book intends to increase the reader's competence to read original literature on network analysis by providing a glossary and intensive translation of formal notation and mathematical symbols in everyday speech. Different aspects of network analysis literacy - understanding formal definitions, programming tasks, or the analysis of structural measures and their interpretation - are deepened in various exercises with provided solutions. This text is an excellent, if not the best starting point for all scientists who want to harness the power of network analysis for their field of expertise.
Publication Date: 2016-10-27
Network Analysis with R by Douglas A. LukePresenting a comprehensive resource for the mastery of network analysis in R, the goal of Network Analysis with R is to introduce modern network analysis techniques in R to social, physical, and health scientists. The mathematical foundations of network analysis are emphasized in an accessible way and readers are guided through the basic steps of network studies: network conceptualization, data collection and management, network description, visualization, and building and testing statistical models of networks. As with all of the books in the Use R! series, each chapter contains extensive R code and detailed visualizations of datasets. Appendices will describe the R network packages and the datasets used in the book. An R package developed specifically for the book, available to readers on GitHub, contains relevant code and real-world network datasets as well.
Publication Date: 2015-12-21
The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis by John Scott (Editor); Peter J. Carrington (Editor)This sparkling Handbook offers an unrivalled resource for those engaged in the cutting edge field of social network analysis. Systematically, it introduces readers to the key concepts, substantive topics, central methods and prime debates. Among the specific areas covered are: Network theory Interdisciplinary applications Online networks Corporate networks Lobbying networks Deviant networks Measuring devices Key Methodologies Software applications. The result is a peerless resource for teachers and students which offers a critical survey of the origins, basic issues and major debates. The Handbook provides a one-stop guide that will be used by readers for decades to come.
Jon MacKay
From The Programming Historian : "In this lesson we will learn how to use a graph database to store and analyze complex networked information. This tutorial will focus on the Neo4j graph database, and the Cypher query language that comes with it."
Marten Düring
From The Programming Historian : "Network visualizations can help humanities scholars reveal hidden and complex patterns and structures in textual sources. This tutorial explains how to extract network data (people, institutions, places, etc) from historical sources through the use of non-technical methods developed in Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA), and how to visualize this data with the platform-independent and particularly easy-to-use Palladio."
John Ladd, Jessica Otis, Christopher N. Warren, and Scott Weingart
From The Programming Historian : "This lesson introduces network metrics and how to draw conclusions from them when working with humanities data. You will learn how to use the NetworkX Python package to produce and work with these network statistics."
Ryan Deschamps
From The Programming Historian : "This tutorial explains how to carry out and interpret a correspondence analysis, which can be used to identify relationships within categorical data."