September 2011
Beginner
188 pages
4h 57m
English
Content preview from Social Network Analysis for StartupsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Introduction
“So…what do you do?”
“I’m a social network analysis researcher.”
“Oh, so you play on Facebook and get paid for it?”
This dialogue occurs frighteningly often in the life of any SNA researcher. And the answer of “Yes, but it’s much more than Facebook” does not cut it. In fact, SNA is an extremely versatile methodology that predates Twitter and Facebook by at least 30 years.
In a few words, Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be described as a “study of human relationships by means of graph theory.” However, this sentence leaves a lot to be unpacked.
In a way, SNA is similar to many statistical methods. The fact that economists use regression analysis extensively doesn’t mean that the technique is limited to the study of economics. Similarly, while studying the social media is a great way to apply SNA techniques—not only is the data easily available, but the opportunities for studying are numerous and lucrative. In fact, I am willing to bet that 9 out of 10 of my esteemed readers have picked up this book for this very reason.
Ten years ago, the field of social network analysis was a scientific backwater. We were the misfits, rejected from both mainstream sociology and mainstream computer science, applying strange mathematical techniques to strange sorts of data and coming up with pretty pictures that were very hard to read and results that made sense only within our narrow community. Social network data was difficult to gather and hard to come by (see Appendix A); most ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.