Social Network Analysis

(CSE 4074)
CHAPTER 1- INTRODUCTION

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 Social Network Analysis
1. A social network is a social structure of people,
related (directly or indirectly) to each other
through a common relation or interest.
2. Social network analysis (SNA) is the study of
social networks to understand their structure and
behavior

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 Why Social Networks?
Analysis of these social connections and interactions can help us understand,
- who the important people are in a network,
- what roles a person plays,
- what subgroups of users are highly interconnected,
- how things like news or rumors will spread through a network,
- and how users participate.
 A good social network analyst working with social media needs to know how to analyze the structure of
networks, apply sociological principles to understand user behavior, and deal with the size, scope, and
application of the networks.

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 CSE 4074 SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS [3 0 0 3]
Course Objectives:
•Develop the skills of Social Network Concepts and Techniques
•Understand the concept of network and its structures
•Represent and process Network Relations
•Understand the various algorithms and optimization techniques for identifying social network.
•Familiarize with Web based Social Network Applications

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 CSE 4074 SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS [3 0 0 3]
Course Outcomes:
At the end of the course, students will be able to
Understand and visualize the basic concepts of network structure and representation of Social Network
Analysis
Analyze the Social Network structure and visualize them in the form of layouts
Apply the Social Network Concepts in solving problems related to social, personal, business and international
levels
Understand and Implement the algorithm for discovering communities in Social Networks
Understand the algorithm and models for social influence analysis

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Text Books:
1. Jennifer Goldbeck, Analyzing the Social Web, Morgan
Kaufmann Publications,2013.
2. Charu C. Aggarwal, Social Network Data Analytics,
Springer Publications, 2011.

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 Brief History of Social Web
•Web invented in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee.
 Chat rooms and discussion forums existed before web.
Blogging began in 1997, and the website Blogger went online in 1999.
1997- Six Degrees- First site to launch in the spirit of Social Networking-profiles
Friendster launched in 2002, first major social networking site
LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook in 2010.

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 Social Networking vs Social Media

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 Analyzing the social web

1. Classic social network analysis studies a network’s structure.

2. In a social network, a person is considered a node or vertex, and a relationship
between people is a link or edge. When all the people and relationships are
identified, there are many statistics that can provide insight into the network.

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 Figure 1: A Sample Network
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 Analyzing the social web
Quantitative measures : This will include measures of a person’s importance, how
well connected the people in the network are, and which people form communities or
clusters together.

Qualitative attributes: Tie-Strength, trust, visualization

Network phenomena: A combination of quantitative and qualitative features

inform our understanding of propagation, and another set of analysis techniques is
available to study the spread of things through networks.

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 Tools used
1) Gephi: It is an open-source free software package that runs in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
2) Gephi is a visualization tool with capabilities to calculate centrality, clustering, network diameter,
and other metrics.
3) NodeXL: a template for Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, and later Excel versions on Windows.
4) It is a free download. Like Gephi, it has tools for visualizing graphs and computing many common
network analysis statistics.
5) Both tools have features called spigots which allow users to directly import network data from
other sources.
6) Gephi comes with an email network importer, but other spigots are available as plugins.
7) NodeXL can import email as well as queries to Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. These spigots make it
easy to get net- work data for analysis and experimentation.

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 Websites discussed
1) Facebook-style social networks to blogging, and including offline social networks drawn from people’s
behavior and even from literature.
2) Twitter is another dominant website in the social media space, with 200 million active users in 2012. Twitter
is called a microblog. Users post messages that are limited to 140 characters.
3) Photo-sharing sites are popular, and one is Flickr.
4) YouTube, which is owned and run by Google, is the most popular video-sharing website. Like Flickr does with
photos, YouTube lets users upload, share, and comment on videos. They can also become friends with other
users.
5) Social bookmarking sites allow users to share interesting links. They support tagging links, voting them up or
down to indicate interest.
6) Pinterest is another social bookmarking site growing in popularity. It is visual, where users share photos that
often link back to an originat- ing article.
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