From the first lecture, we have been talking about Social
Network. Social Networks consists of a set of actors (i.e., people, organisations
or Web sites) connected by a set of relationships such as friendship,
information exchange, or Web traffic. When one or more relations connect a pair
of actors, it is assumed that the pair has a tie.
Figure 1. Social Networks in Renren.com
Figure 2. Mass Social Networks on the Internet
Then how to gain something useful and avoid the noise from complicated networks consisting of large numbers of nodes and ties? Here comes the SNA. Social Networks analysis (SNA) is a shift from the individual level analysis towards a structural analysis. The characteristics of network analysis include on relationships between actors and the effect of the structure on the outcome. Perhaps one of the most interesting features of network analysis is its visual display called network diagram (see Figure 1 and Figure 2.).
Figure 3. Sociogram of LUO Ling's blog network
I was indeed impressed by the Sociogram of IEMS5720 blogosphere shown by Prof. Chan in the lecture 7. It tells us who is the most influential and who is the most prestigious in the class. For the purpose of further understanding and review of Graph theory related to SNA, I also drew a Sociagram of my blog network (see Figure 3., due to 12 Nov 2012 20:00 pm). The people involved in the diagram are the ones who gave comments to my blogs or the ones who received my comments. The blue node in the middle of the diagram represents myself and I got comments from 5 different classmates and gave comments to 6 other guys in one-way direction. CUI Helei (the red node) got comments from most people and the yellow node has only one tie that means this node has little communication with other nodes in this network. However, it doesn’t necessarily say the red node is more active than the yellow node in other sub groups of the whole class.
There are a lot of interesting concepts and theories in the field of SNA besides the above we have talked, let's continue to find more and learn more through practice.
[1] Hanna L. Schneider, Lilli M. Huber. Social
Networks: Development, Evaluation and Influence. Nova Science Publishers, 2008.
I was also impressed by the sociogram showed in lecture 7. It is quite interesting to study on the sociogram which give us a intuitive congnition of our blog comments structure. Some social phenomena can be easily found in our sociogram, say coliques, coleavage, stars, mutual choice and isolates. Sociogram has some limits: ties show choices but give no reasons about why they choose; Isolation and Centralization are mostly formed by subgroups; the relationship in a sociogram is temporary.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to receive your comment and supplement about sociogram.
DeleteYou are right. Sociogram is easy to use to tell something happened between actors in a network and makes internal connections visualized. However, there are some inevitable limits as you pointed out above. So in a sophisticated SNA, multiple tools and methods will be applied together to support a better analysis result.
I agree with your points. Drawing socialgram is a quite intuitive way to realize relationships around you, and we may get more information on the whole system through SNA.
ReplyDeleteFrom the social graph we have seen, we can only understand how people connected and what's the direction of information flow, I was wondering more information, such as the frequency each two individuals talk and how one reacts when he got others' information, ect.
Thanks for the comment and I think I could learn more about sociogram from you because the sociogram in my blog is just a sub-gram of the big-big-big sociogram you drew for the whole class.
DeleteAs you mentioned about the frequency of communication between two actors, I also cared about the information and even calculated the numbers in my blog network. They stand for how many comments I received from the specific people. I think we can present the number besides the corresponding link to make the sociogram more informative.
How can you draw your sociagram of your own network? Use the NodeXL? It's so interesting thing to draw a network sociagram by yourself. How hard work you did to analysis these connections between you and other people in the some social organization.I also want to create my own sociagram. But I guess it may have so many nodes as you because of my low number of comments. In a word, your explaination of SNA is so clear and easy to understand.
ReplyDeleteHi Silu, happy to receive your comment and this will add weight to our link in my blog sociogram as well as in yours.
DeleteI asked Huang Jie for suggestion of what software to draw a sociogram and she told me NodeXL is a good choice. However, this software doesn't work in Mac's operation system so I had to draw by myself...But I do think this process really enhances my understanding of Lecture 7 and I think you could have a try as well.
OK，I will have a try to draw my own sociagram. It's too shame to say that I haven't totally understand how the nodeXL can analyse these data. So maybe I must learn more about it. When it needs I will ask you for help,OK?
DeleteWith pleasure~
DeleteYeah~ as you said, the sociagram provides a visual way to systemize the complex relationship.In the sociagram, we can easily find the key point, bridge, circle and so on.Thank you for sharing your practice.Good job~
ReplyDeleteWow!! It's a very impressive article!
ReplyDeleteYour words, "Social Networks analysis (SNA) is a shift from the individual level analysis towards a structural analysis." make me feel more clear about the concept of the SNA, and what impresses me most is that you draw your own Sociogram!
It's a concise one that we can see the individuals' connection. And I am glad to see my name on it, ha-ha!
I think that SNA is very useful for us to find some relationship in this "Web World". We should study more knowledge about social networking and like you said, "let's continue to find more and learn more through practice."
Your opinion inspires a lot, SNA is so useful to explain the phenomenon in our daily life, for example, find our old friends on RENREN or Weibo. Your analysis on the case that who is the most influential and who is the most prestigious in the class is really correct.
ReplyDeleteThis is impressive as you created your own sociogram from your blog. The further illustration of the diagram allows reader to know how to draw their own sociogram.
ReplyDelete