Class Business
Office hours today?
ESCIs for course can be filled out until midnight next Friday, Dec. 2
Assignments for Last Week of Course
- For next Tuesday
- Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (2007), pp. 34-64
[Purchase this book, available at the UCEN bookstore] - Ian Gregory and David Cooper, “Geographical Technologies and the Interdisciplinary Study of Peoples and Cultures of the Past” (2013)
- Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (2007), pp. 34-64
Thursday, Dec. 6th (last class) of course: Final project proposal presentation (& assignment)
Practicums 7 & 8: Social Network Analysis Exercises
Student outputs (Part A)
Student outputs (Part B)
- Anya Macomber
- Jake Houser
- Yiu-On
- Kyle Rokes
- Stella Jia
1. Nodes
One of the most potent ideas in the social sciences is the notion that individuals are embedded in thick webs of social relations and interactions. Social network theory provides an answer to a question that has preoccupied social philosophy since the time of Plato, namely, the problem of social order: how autonomous individuals can combine to create enduring, functioning societies. (Borgatti, et al., 892)



Agent Based Modeling
- Cellular Automata
- Conway’s Game of Life: 1 | 2 | 3
- Rules:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
- Agent-based modeling tools — e.g., Netlogo
- Eric Bonabeau, “Agent-Based Modeling: Methods and Techniques for Simulating Human Systems” (2002)
2. Edges
![]() |
|

Actor-Network Theory
- Wikipedia article on ANT and Bruno Latour
- Example 1 | Example 2

3. Structure
- Paola Pascual-Ferrá, Neil Alperstein, and Daniel J. Barnett, “Social Network Analysis of COVID-19 Public Discourse on Twitter: Implications for Risk Communication” (2020)
- Richard Jean So and Hoyt Long, “Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism” (2013) — read only pp. 147-149, 158-166
4. Historical & Fictional Networks
Historical Networks
Fictional Networks
- Martin Grandjean, “Network Visualization: Mapping Shakespeare’s Tragedies” (2015)
- Stacey Margolis, “Network Theory circa 1800: Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Arthur Mervyn’” (2012)
- David K. Elson, Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen R. McKeown, “Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction” (2010)
- Anthony Bonato, “Social Networks in Novels and Films” (2018)
- Anthony Bonato, David Ryan D’Angelo, Ethan R. Elenberg, David F. Gleich, and Yangyang Hou, “Mining and Modeling Character Networks” (2016)
Historical vs. Fictional Networks
|
|
4. Other Issues?
- Lucia Russo, et al., “A Complex Network Theory Approach for the Spatial Distribution of Fire Breaks in Heterogeneous Forest Landscapes for the Control of Wildland Fires” (2016)
- Gabor Csardi, “Igraph R Manual Pages” (n. d.)

