The current buzz about "social networking software" is about software that finds paths through representations of social networks. The respresentations are created by people entering in friends, business accociates or other relationships or they are created by reading through e-mail and other Internet based data.

This class is about the underlying structures, the social networks themselves. In addition to paths, network position, the structure of the networks and much more tell us about how the people in the network will act. The course uses reading, lecture and hands-on to learn the basics of using Social Network Analysis to model real world situations.

The class is good for consultants that would like to add to their skills; for human resoures, operations or organizational development managers; for software engineers interested in the types of information available from social networks; for professionals in psychology, managements and other human factors areas; or for anyone with general interest in this rapidly developing area. The students will learn how to use the primary network visualization tools: Pajek, UCINet and Mage.

The class will be taught by Sean Everton, a PhD student in Mark Granovetter's group at Stanford. Sean is the author of the Guide for the Visually Perplexed and is THE guy to learn social networking tools from.

Introduction to Social Networks

Small Worlds

Scale Free Networks

Rational Choice and Social Embeddedness

Sociometry and Sociograms

Balance Theory

Sentiments and Friendships

Gathering and Preparing Social Network Data

Data Collection Issues

Attributes and Relations

Exchange Theory

Centrality and Power

Prestige and Status

The Duality of Persons and Groups

Religious Conversion and Recruitment to Social Movements

Dynamics of Voluntary Associations

The Strength of Weak Ties

The Strength of Strong Ties

The Diffusion of Innovations

The Spread of Early Christianity: The Mission to the Jews

The Spread of Institutional Innovations: The Case of Women's Ordination

World Society Theory and the Nation State

Cohesive Subgroups Networks, Markets and the Problem of Embeddedness

The Social Networks of Silicon Valley

Structural, Isomorphic and Regular Equivalence

Blocks and blockmodeling.

Don Steiny - Organizer and Moderator

return to Connecting People, Organizations and Ideas