Course Schedule

Le1 - Thu Oct. 6, 2022 Introduction to the course, What is social network analysis, What is a network, Examples of networks, Introducing the class, their own background and their expectation on the course

Le2 - Fri Oct. 7, 2022 Social cognition and social network analytics, Social network game, Bonding and bridging social capitals, Entitativity and ostracism, The cyber ball, Cohesion and brokerage, 

Le3 - Fri Oct. 14, 2022 Networks as graphs; Directed and undirected networks; Examples; Weighted and signed graphs; The adjacency matrix: symmetries and conventions; Sparsity.

Le4 - Thurs Oct. 20, 2022  Granovetter's weak tie theory, Weak ties, bridges, and structural holes, Efficient and effective networks. Project milestones: theoretical grounding, relevance, shaping the research question.

Le5 - Fri Oct. 21, 2022 Bipartite graphs; Projections; Centrality measures; Degree for undirected and directed networks; Average degree; Authorities and hubs; Degree distribution; Loglog plot.

Le6 - Thu Oct. 27, 2022  Literature search: how to theoretically ground your research ideas in scientifically sound evidence. Tools and methods to look for literature search using online sources from key work planning to content management: how to assess journal authority, how to select relevant manuscripts, how to evaluate the quality of papers. Literature search lab in the classroom.

Le7 - Fri Oct. 28, 2022 Brainstorming session on projects: 1) Language and sexist hate speech, 2) Menstrual stigma, 3) Anxiety and social media, 4) Politicians targeting young people on social networks. 

Le9 - Fri Nov. 4, 2022 Statistical sampling; IP discussion continued; The power-law and scale-free networks; Preferential attachment; PageRank centrality: the random walk rationale; Solution to dead ends and spider traps: the teleportation vector.

Le10 - Tue Nov. 8, 2022 (tentative) Presentation of interdisciplinary projects to engineers/data scientists

Le11 - Thu Nov. 10, 2022 Pagerank versus degree; Tuning the teleport vector: local PageRank and topic specific PageRank; Examples of application; Closeness centrality; Betweenness centrality.

Le12 - Fri Nov. 11, 2022 Semantic networks: issues about text retrieval, mining, and coding. Focus on linguistic cues of psychological processes and inter group relations. Overview of properties coded with LIWC dictionary

Le13 - Thu Nov. 17, 2022 Clustering coefficient; Wrap up on centrality measures; Polarisation, homophily, selective exposure; Echo chambers and filter bubbles; Examples.

Le14 - Fri Nov. 18, 2022 Polarisation in pro-life/pro-choice networks; Assortative and disassortative networks; Nearest neighbour degree; Conceptual picture of a network and its relation to Granovetter's theory; Algorithmic approaches; The core-periphery model; Overlapping communities.

Le15 - Thu Nov. 24, 2022 The relation between personality, structural position in the network and productivity. 

Le16 - Fri Nov. 25, 2022 Social contagion. A review of social influence on several behaviors.  A study distinguishing homophily from contagion. A field experiment showing the power of small manipulation in the context of voting behaviors.  Social contagion spreads faster across strong ties, with important consequences for the political involvement of crowds.

Le17 - Thu Dec. 1, 2022 IPs discussion: victim blaming, menstrual stigma, cancel culture, hate speech covid, accomodation

Le18 - Fri Dec. 2, 2022 IPs discussion mental health, hate speech, incels; Community detection: some algorithmic approaches; Network robustness; Robustness of scale-free networks; Robustness to attacks; Optimizing robustness; Example with Tweets sentiments.

Le19 - Thu Dec. 15, 2022 Twitter and Reddit Lab: how to scrape data from social networks by using R. by Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara

Le20 - Fri Dec. 16, 2022 Gephi Lab: how to give networks a graphical representation through the open-source software Gephi https://gephi.org/. by Lejla Dzanko

Le21 - Thu Dec. 22, 2022 (tentative) IP projects feedback