Note that Adam and Doug are not in my professional network (noticed the absence of red edges between us) because we have never worked together. In this case, the red edges represent the colleague relationship. If you want to look at my professional network, that social graph looks like figure 2b. In this case, the black edges represent friendship, or just people who know each other. If my seven hypothetical friends are all on Facebook then the friendship graph would look like figure 2a. But they are much better than me, so I actually never play with Ryan, Phil, or Doug. Ryan also plays, and has played with Phil and Doug. I have played with Joe at Lithium, with Jack at Berkeley, and with Don at Los Alamos. Everywhere I've worked, I've found a badminton pal. After I joined Lithium, I found out that Phil and Jack often go drinking too, but I've never gone drinking with either of them.įinally, I love badminton. But Ryan and Doug don't get along and never go out together. I often went out for drinks with Doug, Adam and Ryan during grad school. The other part of my social life consists of my beer buddies. That is why Ryan also worked with both Jack and Don, but Jack and Don are not colleagues. Ryan came to Berkeley for his PhD with me, so we overlapped in two jobs. Before, I joined Lithium, I also worked with Jack and Ryan at UC Berkeley, and prior to that, I worked with Ryan and Don at the Los Alamos National Lab.
So what is my social life like? My social network consists of my colleagues at Lithium (Phil, and Joe, who obviously are also colleagues of each other). Suppose I have a very simple life, and I only have three types of social relationships in my life: colleagues at work (denoted by the red edges), beer buddies (blue edges), and badminton pals (green edges). Let's suppose that I, Michael, have a very small social network consisting of only seven friends (see the names in figure 1). I will illustrate this with an example.Ī Representative Social Network and Its Social Graphs As there are many complex relationships among people, there are equally many different social graphs that represent these relationships. node or vertex) represents a person, and an edge between two dots (persons) represents a relationship between them. And in the context of SNA, you can think of a social graph as simply a diagram that represents the social network (I am not going to bore you with the formal definition of a graph). Of course, the entities that interest us are people, and the relationships that are of particular interest include friendships (as in Facebook), colleagues (as in LinkedIn), kinship, communications, and several other social interactions. wolves, lions, dolphins, bats, and even ants). In fact, social networks exist even in many social animals beside humans (e.g. This concept has existed since humans began walking the earth. Simply put, SNA is the analysis of social networks and a social network is just a network of entities that are connected by the relationship among the entities. To understand social network analysis (SNA), you must understand what a social network is, and what a social graph is. You can follow him on Twitter at mich8elwu. He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. is Lithium's Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and online communities.
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