Chapter Five:

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

What is Social Network?

 A social network is a social
structure made up of individuals
(or organizations) called "nodes",
which are tied (connected) by one
or more specific types of
interdependency, such as
friendship, kinship, common
interest, financial exchange,
dislike, sexual relationships, or
relationships of beliefs,
knowledge or prestige.
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 Social Network Analysis (SNA)
 Social network analysis views social relationships in terms
of network theory, consisting of nodes (representing
individual actors with in the network) and ties (which
represent relationships between the individuals (also called
edges, links, or connections).

 These networks are often depicted or show in a

social network diagram, where nodes are represented as
points and ties are represented as lines.

 Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties
are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-
based structures are often very complex.
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 Social Network Analysis (SNA)
 There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes.
Research in a number of academic fields has shown that
social networks operate on many levels, from families up
to the level of nations, and play a critical role in
determining the way problems are solved, organizations
are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in
achieving their goals.

 In its simplest form, a social network is a map of

specified ties, such as friendship, between the nodes being
studied.

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 Social Network Analysis (SNA)
The nodes to which an individual is thus
connected are the social contacts of that
individual.

The network can also be used to measure social

capital – the value that an individual gets from
the social network. These concepts are often
displayed in a social network diagram, where
nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

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 Sociology of Science
 Sociology is the study of human social
behavior and its origins, development,
organizations, and institutions.
 A goal for many sociologists is to conduct
research which may be applied directly to social
policy and welfare, while others focus primarily
on refining the theoretical understanding of social
processes.
The traditional focuses of sociology include social
stratification, social class, social
mobility,
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religion, secularization, law, and deviance.
 E-Prints: E-Prints is a free and open-source
software package for building open access repositories that
are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting. It shares many of the features
commonly seen in document management systems, but is
primarily used for institutional repositories and scientific
journals.

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 Cont.

 E-Prints repositories provide:

 High specification repository platform for high visibility,
high quality institutional open access collections,
 Time saving deposits,
 Import data from other repositories and services,
 Auto complete-as-you-type for fast data entry,
 Tightly-managed, quality-controlled code framework,
 Flexible plug-in architecture for developing extensions.

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 Visualization

Is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or

animations to communicate a message.

Visualization through visual imagery has been an

effective way to communicate both abstract and
concrete ideas since the dawn of man.

8
 Cont.
 Visualization today has ever-expanding applications in
science, education, engineering (e.g., product
visualization), interactive multimedia, medicine, etc.

 Typical visualization application is the field of computer

graphics.

 The invention of computer graphics may be the most

important development in visualization since the
invention of central perspective in the Renaissance
period.

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 Applications of visualization
Scientific visualization is the use of interactive, sensory
representations, typically visual, of abstract data to
reinforce cognition, hypothesis building, and reasoning.
 it is the transformation, selection, or representation of
data from simulations or experiments, with an implicit or
explicit geometric structure, to allow the exploration,
analysis, and understanding of the data.


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 Cont.
 It focuses and emphasizes the representation of
higher order data using primarily graphics and
animation technique

Data visualization is a related subcategory of

visualization dealing with statistical graphics and
geographic or spatial data (as in thematic
cartography) that is abstracted in schematic form.

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 Applications of visualization
Educational visualization is using a simulation not usually
normally created on a computer to create an image of
something so it can be taught about.

 Information visualization concentrates on the use of computer-

supported tools to explore large amount of abstract data.

Knowledge visualization is The use of visual

representations to transfer knowledge between at least two
person’s aims to improve the transfer of knowledge by using
computer and non-computer-based visualization methods
complementarily.

12
 Cont.
 Product visualization involves visualization software
technology for the viewing and manipulation of 3D models,
technical drawing and other related documentation of
manufactured components and large assemblies of products.

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 Applications of visualization
Systems visualization is a new field of visualization
which integrates and subsumes existing visualization
methodologies and adds to it narrative storytelling, visual
metaphors (from the field of advertising) and visual
design.

Visual communication is the communication of ideas

through the visual display of information. Primarily
associated with two dimensional images, it includes:
alphanumeric, art, signs, and electronic resources.

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 Cont.
 Visual analytics focuses on human interaction with
visualization systems as part of a larger process of
data analysis.

 Visual analytics has been defined as "the science of

analytical reasoning supported by the interactive
visual interface".

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 What is Creative Commons?

 Creative Commons helps you share your knowledge

and creativity with the world. Creative Commons
develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical
infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity,
sharing, and innovation.

16
 Cont.
 Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit
organization headquartered in Mountain View,
California, United States, devoted to expanding the
range of creative works available for others to build
upon legally and to share.

 The organization has released several copyright-

licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free
of charge to the public.

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 Collaborator
 A Collaborator is defined as a “center without walls, in which
the nation’s researchers can perform their research without
regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues,
accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational
resources, and accessing information in digital libraries”.

 It is “a system which combines the interests of the scientific

community at large with those of the computer science and
engineering community to create integrated, tool-oriented
computing and communication systems to support scientific
collaboration”

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 Cont.
 A collaborator as being an experimental and empirical
research environment in which scientists work and
communicate with each other to design systems, participate in
collaborative science, and conduct experiments to evaluate
and improve systems.

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 Web metrics
 The science of Web metrics(also cyber metrics) tries to measure
the WWW to get knowledge about the number and types of
hyperlinks, structure of the World Wide Web and usage patterns.

 Web metrics is a set of quantitative techniques for tracking and

evaluating the impact of web sites and online ideas and the
information science research field that developed these ideas.

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 Cont.
 Web metrics is "the study of the quantitative aspects
of the construction and use of information resources,
structures and technologies on the Web drawing on
Bibliometric and info metric approaches." Web
metrics has also been introduced, "the study of web-
based content with primarily quantitative methods for
social science research goals using techniques that are
not specific to one field of study".

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 E-Metrics
 E-Metrics is a full service management information
solution that gives you an overview of the
effectiveness of your e-business and digital
marketing.

 It enables you to improve the effectiveness of your

website, your campaigns, your online revenues and
your conversion of visitors into leads. It also helps
you to understand your customers’ needs better.

 The ultimate goal is to increase top-line revenues,

market awareness, improve productivity within the
enterprise and positively affect bottom line results.
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