Social network analysis of historical communities: Some questions from the present for the past

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Wellman ◽  
Charles Wetherell
Author(s):  
Tom Brughmans ◽  
Anna Collar

As his keynote address to the 1990 Sunbelt Social Networks conference, Mark Granovetter presented a paper entitled ‘The Myth of Social Network Analysis as a Special Method in the Social Sciences’ (Granovetter 1990). In it, he described how the popular social network theory he proposed, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ (Granovetter 1973), was like a spectre that haunted his academic career: although he subsequently pursued other research interests, he found that ‘as I got more deeply into any subject, network ideas kept coming in the back door’. He concluded that social network analysis (SNA) is not a ‘special’ method in social science, because ‘no part of social life can be properly analysed without seeing how it is fundamentally embedded in networks of social relations’ (Granovetter 1990: 15). However, he noted that to many, SNA is an alien concept: ‘we need to remember that there are many scholars outside the house of social network analysis who think in a relational way but don’t see the kinship with network methods and ideas’ (Granovetter 1990: 15). This observation echoes the current position of network studies in archaeology and history. Few would argue that relationships between social entities are not important for understanding past social processes. However, more explicit application of network theories and methods is not yet a mainstream part of our disciplines. Although it is the case that some researchers are not aware of the advantages such perspectives might offer, the current ‘niche’ status of network applications in archaeological and historical research relates to a more general misperception: that network concepts and methodologies per se are simply not appropriate for use in research in these disciplines. This volume aims to address both issues: the contributions in this volume demonstrate both the enormous potential of network methodologies, and also—and perhaps more importantly—acknowledge and address a range of perceived problems and reservations relating to the application of network perspectives to the study of the past, thereby encouraging and enabling their wider use in archaeology and history. The full diversity of network perspectives has only been introduced in our disciplines relatively recently.


2020 ◽  
Vol 185 ◽  
pp. 02024
Author(s):  
Yuqing Liao ◽  
Jingliang Chen

Based on the green finance policies in China from 2017 to 2019, this paper extracts feature and high-frequency words from policy documents, uses word cloud diagram, co-occurrence matrix and social network analysis techniques to quantitatively analyse the information contained in the green finance policies over the past three years and highlights the hot issues in question, thus providing a multi-layered and wideranging pathway for facilitating the orderly development of green finance industries across China.


Target ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziyun Xu

As the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) has continued to expand rapidly over the past twenty years, scientometric research has been applied increasingly often to analyse its trends and patterns. Drawing inspiration from Social Network Analysis (SNA), this study aims to quantify academic research impact and identify patterns of influence at an institutional level in Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS), by seeking answers to the following questions: Which are the most influential publications? Which institutions carry the most weight? How have their respective levels of influence evolved over time? By analysing a near-exhaustive corpus of 59,303 citations from CIS literature, the study reveals that the majority of influential publications are monographs and theoretical in nature, though many Chinese textbooks on interpreting are also highly influential. It also finds that an institution’s ranking in research productivity does not necessarily translate into high academic influence.


1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (S6) ◽  
pp. 125-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Wetherell

In the past two decades, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major analytical paradigm in sociology and now occupies a strategic place in disciplinary debates on a wide variety of issues. Historians, however, have been slow to adopt the approach for at least three reasons. First, the conceptual orientation of sociologists practicing historical social network analysis (HSNA) remains unfamiliar to the majority of professional historians. Just when SNA was maturing in the late 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary interest in social science theory among historians, so characteristic of the 1970s and early 1980s, began to wane. The subsequent turn toward post modernist thinking in history left the profession increasingly uninformed about both classical and contemporary social theory. Second, those quantitatively-oriented historians who might be predisposed to use SNA's specialized statistical methods constitute less than a quarter of the profession today, thus the risk of SNA finding its way into mainstream historical scholarship is low to start. Third, SNA's data requirements are formidable. SNA demands evidence of social interaction among all members of a social system for a variety of behaviors, and thus necessitates a broad range of high-quality records for the place, time and activities being studied. Because historians are plagued by an incomplete historical record and imperfect understandings of past social relations, HSNA remains an inherently problematic enterprise. Yet despite conceptual, methodological and evidentiary obstacles, SNA possesses real potential for historical analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (26) ◽  
pp. 143-154
Author(s):  
Pei Yee Tan ◽  
Hairul Nizam Ismail ◽  
Syed Muhammad Rafy Syed Jaafar

As the growing research interest and discussion on social network analysis associated with tourism flows, this paper reviewed 31 studies focused on tourism flows with social network analysis in the past ten years. To ensure the accuracy of the literature review, a systematic quantitative literature review with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), together with descriptive and content analyses, was used to synthesise these past studies. With that, this review aims to (1) identify the overall research trends of social network analysis in tourism flows studies, (2) types and methods of data collection used, as well as (3) future research opportunities. The review findings present an interesting result with the past studies mostly focusing on examining tourist movement, tourism destination management, and tourist behavioural patterns. Furthermore, this review also provides significant findings on emerging data collection methods, like big data, in tourism research. To sum up, this paper offers an insight into social network analysis in tourism flows, primarily on the state of knowledge, methodological understanding, and future research gaps.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsair-Wei Chien ◽  
Hsien-Yi Wang ◽  
Yang Shao ◽  
Willy Chou

BACKGROUND Over 47,703 articles were found on Pubmed.com by searching for the keyword “association between[Title]” in the past. However, to date, none present the association between cited-by and similar journals related to a given journal. Authors need one effective and efficient way to find journals related to a specific journal. The strength of association between cited-by and similar journals for a given journal is required to report. OBJECTIVE This study aims (1) to present the feature of a given journal about their keyword topics and international author collaborations; (2) to show the cited-by and similar journals related to the given journal; (3) to investigate the association between their cited-by and similar journals. METHODS We obtained 85 abstracts since 2013 from Medline based on the keywords of ("JMIR Serious Games[Journal]) on June 30, 2018, and plotted the clusters, including (i) international author collaborations, (ii) keyword topics, (iii)cited-by and similar journals related to JMIR Serious Games(JSG), and (iv) association between cited-by and similar journals, on Google Maps by using social network analysis(SNA). RESULTS This study found that (1) the most number of papers are from the U.S.( 28, 32.9%) and the U.K. (11,12.9 %), the most frequently used keywords are serious games and video games; (2) the top two journals for cited-by and similar journals, respectively, are (i) JMIR mHealth uHealth(IF=4.541), J Med Internet Res (IF=4.671) and (ii) Games Health J (IF= 2.019), J Med Internet Res (IF=4.671); (3) a mild association(=0.14) exists between cited-by and similar journals related to JSG. CONCLUSIONS SNA provides deep insight into the relationships of related journals to a given journal. The results of this research can provide readers with a knowledge and concept diagram to use with future manuscript submissions to JSG. CLINICALTRIAL Not available


Author(s):  
Martin Bouchard ◽  
Aili Malm

This chapter discusses how the development of network analysis techniques has affected research on crime and the practice of crime control over the past two decades. It describes the contributions of network analysis to criminological research, including the new questions that network analysis techniques allowed criminologists to address, the old questions that have been addressed more adequately, and the novel evidence these techniques yielded. The ways in which network analysis been used by the police and other practitioners in their efforts to prevent and control crime is reviewed, as well as the limitations of network data in understanding crime patterns.


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