Social network analysis

In your first collaborative excercise, you found named entities in texts. That’s already informative, but it’s even more interesting to see what names occur together. A network of associations can inform us about influence and relations. Mathematicians refer to this kind of network as a graph. In your second collaborative assignment, you’ll build a social network, or graph, from mythological texts.

Class preparation

• For an illustrative example of a social network, pllease read the Wikipedia article “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.
• Then read the first part of this introduction to social network analysis, through “Dyads and Cliques”. (You don’t need to read the further sections beginning with the one labelled “Implemenation”).

Be sure you understand the following concepts:

• edges and nodes
• directed and undirected graphs
• the degree of a node
• how do measures of closeness and betweenness tell us about the role of a node in a social network?