Abstract
The first chapter of the book gives a short overview of what network analysis does and why it is considered to be a vital part of complex system science : the network analytic framework allows to represent the interaction structure of a complex system as a complex network. The network’s structure can then be analyzed by the application of several structural measures. However, there are two different branches in network analysis that either use the resulting values to find so-called universal features of complex systems or to allow a contextual, semantic analysis . The latter focuses on the connection between structure and function of a network with respect to the complex system of interest and some specific research question. There is a caveat, though: while, in principle, structural measures can be applied to all kinds of networks, if one is only searching for universal features, their results are not always interpretable with respect to a predefined research question. The term “network analysis literacy” is introduced to describe the knowledge of when to apply which measure to yield an interpretable result with respect to the complex system of interest.
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Notes
- 1.
For each year from 1950 to 2012, a Google Scholar search with both terms, connected by an “OR” was conducted. The number of results displayed was taken as the data point for the given year. The number of results is unlikely to hit the number of published articles in any way but gives at least an indication of the strongly increased interest in the topic.
- 2.
Note that double counting is as likely as an underestimation of the number of articles: articles with this topic may, for example, have been overlooked because they were published in a non-public journal which Google Scholar might not have access to. Again, the number given by Google scholar is only an indication of how many articles really have been published.
- 3.
- 4.
Freely downloadable from http://gephi.org/.
- 5.
The main conference for graph drawing related articles is the International Symposium of Graph Drawing and the main journal is the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications. An impressive free online archive of graph drawing related papers, the Graph Drawing E-Print Archive (GDEA), can be found at: http://gdea.informatik.uni-koeln.de.
- 6.
- 7.
An autonomous system comprises a set of computers that are organized by a distinct entity, an Internet service provide, a company, or a university.
- 8.
The data was retrieved from http://snap.stanford.edu/data/as.html, and compiled by Leskovec et al. [17].
- 9.
Retrieved from http://deim.urv.cat/~aarenas/data/xarxes/email.zip [11]. The data only contains the biggest connected component.
- 10.
Of course, just because one kind of mechanism produces the behavior, it does not imply that all systems that show the behavior need to be built by this mechanism. See Chap. 12 for examples of this observation.
- 11.
Such graphs are said to be isomorphic . See p. 178 for a formal definition.
- 12.
If you, dear reader, have not yet heard of it, go and read the famous paper by Watts and Strogatz [25]. See you later!
- 13.
The book is freely available at http://barabasi.com/networksciencebook/.
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Zweig, K.A. (2016). A First Encounter. In: Network Analysis Literacy. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0741-6_1
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