Promoting Social Network Analysis

A two-day conference to be held at the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), University of Manchester on 21 and 22 October, 2004.

The conference is supported by the ESRC Research Methods Programme and there is no charge for attendance.

Thursday 21 October: Learning Social Network Analysis

Duration: One day

Potential participants: postgraduate students and researchers in social sciences who have a potential interest in social network analysis but little existing knowledge of its applications or software.

Aims:

• to introduce participants to appreciate network method of analysing social relations
• to appreciate thamples of social network analysis in the literature
• to carry out some analysis of social networks found in participant’s field of research and study.

Morning: 10-12.30

The following issues will be discussed:

• how social relations can be conceived in network terms, and with what implications
• key examples of relations as networks (classrooms, elite groups, businesses alliances, international trade or world systems, social movements and activists, joint consumptions, innovation alliances, bibliographic and patent citations, the Web)
• understanding important elements of networks: centrality, hubs and authorities and their uses in the literature
• how to unravel the structure of networks: cores and components and their uses
• what are clusters and blockmodels and their uses.

Lunch: 12.30-1.30

Afternoon, 1.30 to 5.00

Practical session

The afternoon will offer a basic guidance of social network methods using Pajek software:

• representation of networks in different softwares (simple DL and NET files)
• two-mode networks and temporal networks
• visualising networks and including networks in Microsoft word documents
• directed and non-directed networks
• centralities
• cores and components
• blockmodels.
  
  

There are a maximum of twenty places on this course, to be filled on first come, first served basis. The conference is supported by the ESRC Research Methods Programme and there is no charge for attendance.

Friday 22 October: New Issues in Social Network Analysis

Keynote speaker – Ann Mische, Rutgers University

This conference, held as part of an ESRC project Promoting Social Network Analysis, explores the potential for social network analysis within social science research. Although social network methods were developed in the UK in the 1950s by anthropologists and (later) sociologists, they have largely fallen into disuse, despite their popularity in the US, and despite the proliferation of network metaphors in much current social research and theory. The aim of this conference is to consider the potential for social network analysis to engage with current issues in social research.

This day will consist of a series of four papers by exponents of social network analysis who will explore new and emerging issues, and the potential of network methods. Although reference to specific applications will be made, the discussions will be pitched at a level that does not demand specific expertise in social network methods.