SNA All-Star: Sean F. Everton

Sean F. Everton is an Assistant Professor in the Defense Analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. He is also the Co-Director of the Common Operational Research Environment (CORE) Lab. Before joining the faculty of NPS, he was an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University and Stanford University. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Stanford, an MA in Sociology from San Jose State University, an MDiv from Vanderbilt University, and a BS in Accounting from Santa Clara University. His work spans a variety of disciplines, including economic sociology, political sociology, sociology of religion, and notably, social network analysis. 

He recently published a book on the use of social network analysis to both track and disrupt “dark networks,” which are covert or illegal networks, such as criminal or terrorist networks, gangs, drug cartels, or resistance movements. The book, Disrupting Dark Networks, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.Most recently, he has co-authored with Daniel Cunningham and William Fox, both at the Naval Postgraduate School. 

Prior to his academic career, he worked as a professional baseball player, a certified public accountant, and as a pastor.

Recent publications include:

2012. Disrupting Dark Networks. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2014. "Dark Network Resilience in a Hostile Environment: Optimizing Centralization and Density.” Forthcoming in Journal of Contemporary Criminology (with Daniel Cunningham). 

2014. “Using Data Envelopment Analysis and Analytical Hierarchy Process to Find Node Influences in a Social Network.” Forthcoming in Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation (with William Fox). 

2013. “Mathematical Modeling in Social Network Analysis: Using TOPSIS to Find Node Influences in a Social Network.”  Journal of Mathematics and Systems Science 3:531-541 (with William Fox).

SNA All-Star: Emilie Hafner-Burton

Other than having the dubious distinction of being one of very few women on the SNA All-Stars list, Professor Emilie Hafner-Burton is a professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Her work integrates social network analysis with the fields of international relations (IR), economics, and gender studies. In particular, her research examines how social network analysis can be used to identify the influence of networks on international outcomes.

Since the early 2000s, Professor Hafner-Burton has collaborated with academics such as Professor Alexander Montgomery and Professor Miles Kahler to apply social network analysis to international relations.

Her paper with Professor Montgomery, “Power Positions: International Organizations, Social Networks, and Conflict” looks at the ties between members of intergovernmental organization (IGO), and how these ties result in ‘clusters’ of shared ideology that heavily influence policy decisions. These clusters can lead to inequalities of social power between states, which are major factors in either keeping peace or declaring war.

Another paper, “Network Analysis for International Organizations” lays the foundations for the potential of using social network analysis in international relations. In this paper, Professors Hafner-Burton, Montgomery, and Kahler argue that using social network analysis allows us understand the hierarchies and bargaining relationships between states. Using social network analysis also allows for the measurement and study of the core IR concept of ‘power’.

Professor Hafner-Burton holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

SNA All Star: John Arquilla

A professor and chair of the Defense Analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School, John Arquilla coined the term "netwar" to describe the nature and activity of non-state actors that take advantage of information-age capabilities and increasingly use decentralized network structure to organize themselves.

Arquilla first identified the netwar framework in a RAND report "The Advent of Netwar," co-authored with David Ronfeldt in 1996. The two further developed the concept in their 2001 book Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy in which they explain how the information age not only introduced new forms of weapons and targeting (cyberwarfar) but also changed the way terrorist groups and others organize themselves, using information technology to facilitate dispersed activities. Netwar actors, they claim, communicate virtually to organize themselves into three types of network structures: chain networks (end-to-end communication, used primarily in smuggling operations), hub/star networks (used in terrorist networks and drug cartels) and all-channel collaborative networks like those used in peace groups.

Source: The Advent of Netwar, RAND 1996

Arquilla argues that networks will be the next major form of organization in society and that in order to counter the threat from non-hierarchical organizations that use "swarming" attacks, militaries must restructure as networked organizations that can more readily react to the fluid nature of decentralized groups.

SNA All Star: Kathleen M. Carley

Kathleen M. Carley is currently a Professor in the School of Computer Science in the department at the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds teaching appointments at the Social and Decision Sciences Department of the H. John Heinz III College and at the Tepper School of Business, Engineering and Public Policy Department. Professor Carley specializes in organization theory, dynamic network analysis, social networks, multi-agent systems and computational social science, adaptation and evolution, text mining, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, disease contagion and response within and among groups particularly in disaster or crisis situations.

Further, Professor Carley is the Director of Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), a university wide interdisciplinary center that brings together network analysis, computer science and organization science with over 25 members (faculty and staff) and has a funded training program for Ph.D. students. She and her team at the Center have developed infrastructure tools for analyzing large scale dynamic networks and various multi-agent simulation systems including tools  such as ORA (toolkit for analyzing and visualizing multi-dimensional networks), AutoMap (extracts networks from texts and cross-classifies them) BioWar (city-scale network based model to understand the spread of disease and illness due to natural epidemics, chemical spills, biological attacks) and DyNet (covert networks), among others.

Additionally, she is the founding co-editor with Al. Wallace of the journal Computational Organization Theory and has co-edited several books in the computational organizations and dynamic network area, such as Behavioral Modeling and Simulation, From Individuals to Societies (Kathleen M. Carley, et al., 2008, Greg L. Zacharias, Jean MacMillan and Susan B. Van Hemel, editors, National Academies Press, Washington, DC) and Modeling Community Containment for Pandemic Influenza: A Letter Report (Kathleen M. Carley, et al., 2006, Sallie Keller-McNulty, Kirstie L. Bellman, Washington, DC: National Academy Press).

http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/bios/carley/carley.html

http://www.epp.cmu.edu/people/bios/carley.html

http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/index.php

SNA All-Star: Steve Borgatti

Steve Borgatti is a leading researcher and practitioner of social networks analysis. He is currently a professor at the University of Kentucky, editor or on the editorial boards of major social network and organization journals, as well as the publisher of well-known social network analysis software, such as UCINET and NetDraw. He collaborates with Roberta Chase, his wife, on projects such as software publishing and organizing the International Network for Social Network Analysis, of which he was a 2-term president.

Borgatti’s recent book is Analyzing Social Networks, written with Martin G. Everett and Jeffrey C. Johnson and published in 2013.  He has done extensive research in social networks from a variety of different perspectives, from social media networks, neurological professional networks, industry and organizational structures, networks of drug users, and counter-terrorism concerns. He has also contributed methods and tools for data and network visualization through various publications and software development. Finally, he has contributed thoughts on the ethics of mapping and analyzing social networks, through his Toward Ethical Guidelines for Network Research in Organizations, published in 2005.

Importantly, Borgatti enjoys reading science fiction and bowling.

http://gatton.uky.edu/vitas/BorgattiS.pdf

http://www.steveborgatti.com/

SNA All-Star: Frank Harary

Frank Harary became a math instructor at the University of Michigan in 1948 having journeyed from an interest in theoretical physics towards pure mathematics. As he was promoted through the ranks of professorship his research interest kept shifting and in addition to his position in the Department of Mathematics, Harary took on a research associate role in the Institute of Social Research in 1950 joining Leon Festinger and Doriwn Cartwright who had moved part of Kurt Lewin’s original research center to Michigan from MIT. 

An international authority in graph theory, Harary grew increasingly interested in applying graph theory to social relations and structural concepts. Together with Cartwright he authored a key paper on the uses of graph theory for expanding upon Heider’s theory of balance (Cartwright and Harary, 1956). Cartwright and Harary used graph theory to develop a generalization of Heider's theory of balance with the help of concepts from the mathematical theory of linear graphs. 

They translated Heider’s diagrams and language into graph theoretic terms and summarized them visually. They thus were able to make key alterations and extensions to balance theory - Heider's theory was originally intended to refer only to cognitive structures of an individual person while Harary and Cartwright proposed that the definition of balance may be used generally in describing configurations of many different sorts, such as communication networks, power systems, sociometric structures, systems of orientations, or perhaps neural networks - and thus contributed important early advances to the field of SNA. 

The use of graph theory for developing formal definitions for concepts such as cliques, centrality and balance resulted in significant early progress in SNA on both theoretical and methodological grounds.  

Entry is based on Prell "Social Network Analysis" and Cartwright and Harary "Structural balance: a generalization of Heider's theory" 

David McCandless' network of states and groups in the Middle East

Mother Jones highlighted David McCandless' illustration of relationships between various states, armed groups, and power players in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.  His network shows the level of friendship or animosity between states and groups and also identifies whether these nodes are Sunni, Shia, or non-muslim.

The interactive version on McCandless' own site is interesting to play with and helps to tease out the complexity of relationships in the region. Clicking on each node, for instance, takes you to that specific node's connections and is sometimes accompanied by a small description of each relationship in the network.

You can even check out the data he used through a link to a public Google spreadsheet.

This network visualization sent me down a rabbit hole of other analysis of relationships in the Middle East, including this relatively bizarre one from Slate.

Best,
Emma Fredieu

SNA All-Star: Dr. Keith Hampton

Dr. Keith Hampton is currently an Associate Professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information and an affiliate member of the graduate faculty in Sociology. He teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in digital media, communication & society, and social networks. His most notable and recent research focuses on the nature of social networks and how they influence or change urban environments.

Dr. Hampton’s contributions to the SNA field include combining heavy sociological analysis of how modern media and technology intersect with the established SNA paradigms. His work is highly collaborative and involves input from both faculty and graduate students. He has used data from a wide variety of sources – from telephone surveys, to field observations, to census numbers.

Through empirical and longitudinal studies of how technology affects social interactions and well-being, Dr. Hampton focuses on several different yet interconnected themes such as pervasive awareness, social interaction in public spaces, and social media & well-being. His research on Pervasive Awareness is particularly interesting, to me, as it studies “possible outcomes associated with the pervasive nature of social media”* The study aims to examine how “pervasive exposure to information from people’s personal network of friends and family, combined with the anywhere-anytime accessibility of social ties, is likely to affect outcomes”* related to psychological health and the formation of an individual’s opinion.  Perhaps, the larger one’s social network the more distracted or stressed this individual can become?

Another element to his research encompasses the urban environment and social life. Many of his projects examine intersections between public spaces, isolation, and new mobile technologies. One of Dr. Hampton’s projects is an update of American urbanist and organizational analyst William Whyte’s 1980 study titled “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces;” Hampton modernized the research model by observing seven wireless internet abled public parks in 4 cities across North America to identify “how mobile devices augment local interactions and people’s social networks.”*

In the course of his career thus far, Dr. Hampton has received numerous awards and recognitions for his contribution to the fields of sociology, international communication, and urban studies, among others.

    

*Quotes taken directly from Professor Hampton’s public webpage. Click here to visit Dr. Keith Hampton's Website. 

The debate over laptops and cellphones in classrooms

Over the past few weeks, the Fletcher faculty has been having an online debate about disruption caused by the use of laptops and phones in the classroom. It is clear that there is no easy yes-or-no answer.

Earlier today, I sent my colleagues an article by Clay Shirky--one of the country’s most influential thinkers, writers, and teachers on the Internet and society. He has has written a thoughtful and compelling piece on why he has just asked the students in his social media seminar to put their laptops away during class. He’s the last person you’d imagine would advocate this.

Read his arguments, and come to your own conclusion. Click on the post title to see the article.

Social Networks, Entertainment or Business Activity?

Today world is full of Social Networks; it is incredible how the Y and C generations are so dependent and addicted to their social networks, it has transformed the marketing industry and the way companies reach new segments.

It’s important to understand that social networks born with the purpose of maintain contact with friends and as entertainment. Facebook was definitely the first network that really had a big impact in the whole world, even though it was not the first social network in the market.

Soon, companies realize the potential of social media to reach big masses with their advertisements and that’s when the activity of Social Networks started to look profitable for organizations.

Here is where I come to the picture; my family operates it’s own business in Mexico and few years ago we started to wonder how can we take advantage of Social Networks.

My family business is a 25-year-old company dedicated to the distribution of stationery and office products in all the country (similar to Staples). Obviously we do not posses unlimited resources, time and access to information, but we still want to create a competitive advantage using all the channels we have at our disposal.

The challenge is how to increase our market share and build better and stronger relationships with our current customers using social media.

In order to start developing a marketing strategy we need to acquire data about our most profitable and loyal customers, and the most potential buyers that we would like to attract, we would need to know where they buy, how large are their budgets for the products that we offer, what are the things that they value the most (price, on time delivery, quality, etc.), all these information is not so easy to get, however, through social networks analysis we could identify the connections of our potential customers and use our network to reach them.

The most important measure that we would need is to find a connection between our company and the buyer of the companies that we want to reach, finding these persons it’s not so easy because sometimes there are confidentiality clauses that other companies cannot break, but once we could have contact with these buyers we could start to build relationships and hopefully start doing business to increase our customer portfolio.

The Social Network Analysis will definitely play an important role in accomplish this challenge we had set up, through this analysis we would be able to identify key persons and companies, we would be able to receive customer feedback and complaints more directly and faster from our customers in order to fix or areas of improvement, and we would be able to retain our customers now that competitions is so strong in our industry.

Ricardo Contreras Tinoco