SNA All-Star: Linton Freeman

Linton Freeman is currently a research professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches in both the Department of Sociology as well as the UCI Program in Mathematical Behavioral Science. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University, and his current research interests focus on social networks and structures, particularly the structural patterns of ties that link social actors.  

One of Freeman’s most important contributions to the field of social network analysis is his expansion and popularization of centrality, a foundational concept positing that central figures in a network tend to be more influential and visible. Freeman built on the work of Alex Bavelas, who led the Group Networks Laboratory at MIT in the late 1940s. In 1979, Freeman was the first to draw a visual representation of centrality, with his star graph.

His 2004 book, titled The Development of Social Network Analysis: a Study in the Sociology of Science, provides what Christina Prell describes as “the most complete and up-to-date historical account of SNA” (Prell, 19). In this work, Freeman expands traditional accounts of SNA’s origins in the US and Britain to include additional European countries.

Freeman has published an array of works relevant to the field of SNA, such as Centrality in Social Networks: Conceptual Clarification in 1979, and he most recently co-authored Social Networks in the Handbook of Graph Drawing and Visualization.