This course provides a practical introduction to the network perspective and social network analysis (SNA), with a focus on applications in political analysis.
This course will be run in one session per day running over over 5 days.
The course hours are 9.30 am - 12.00pm each day
Prof. Robert Ackland is based in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU). He was awarded his PhD in economics from the ANU in 2001, and he has been researching online social and organisational networks since 2002. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab (http://vosonlab.net) which was established in 2005 and is advancing the social science of the Internet by conducting research, developing research tools, and providing research training. Robert has been teaching masters courses in online research methods and the social science of the internet since 2008 (undergraduate versions of the courses started in 2017). His book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in July 2013. He created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which was publicly released in 2006. The VOSON R packages for collecting and analysing social media network and text data were released in 2015 (Bryan Gertzel is the lead developer), and to date the packages have been downloaded over 80K times with current downloads of 1K per month.
The “network perspective” puts emphasis on social ties between actors, rather than individual characteristics, in understanding behaviour and outcomes. This course provides a practical introduction to the network perspective and social network analysis (SNA), with a focus on applications in political analysis.
Students will gain practical experience in social network analysis in R, using the two main packages for SNA: igraph and statnet.
Topics include: constructing, manipulating and visualising networks; calculating node-level metrics (e.g. indegree centrality) and network-level metrics (e.g. centralisation),and clustering/partitioning networks.
There will also be an introduction to exponential random graph models (ERGM), which provide a statistical inferential framework for modelling interdependencies in social tie formation such homophily, reciprocity and transitivity.
It is recommended that students have prior experience in using R and also are familiar with basic concepts in SNA.
This course will run online using Zoom.
It is recommended that students have prior experience in using R and also are familiar with basic concepts in SNA.
