This is an introductory course to the basic concepts in social network analysis, emphasizing its application in bibliometrics, knowledge management, and digital humanities. Recent years have increased interest in social network analysis (SNA). SNA techniques have been applied in a wide range of domains. There has been a close affinity between SNA and bibliometrics in LIS, where SNA has been used in the study of scholarly collaboration and citation analysis as a way of tracing the intellectual influences manifested in collaboration and citation behaviors among scholars. Author collaboration network typology has been used to represent the cohesion of a scholar community, and co-word network has been used to reveal the intellectual structure and sub-specialties of a domain. In knowledge management, SNA has also been used to assess the typology of social networks in an organization, which has been used to measure the social capital of the individuals and the organization as a whole. With the recent popularity of social networking sites, a growing availability of network data also makes it possible to study similarity and relatedness within a network of people, documents, and websites.

This class is designed for advanced undergraduates or graduate students who wish to acquire a basic understanding of SNA, gain first-hand experience with SNA techniques, and explore the possibility of utilizing SNA for their research.