Lectures content

Le1 - Thu Oct 3, 2024 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 4, 2024 Social cognition and social network analytics, Networks of people, Psychometric network, Semantic networks, The process of a network project, Define problem and purpose, From questions to indicators: an example with #climatechange call for action discourse on Twitter. Networks as graphs; Directed and undirected networks; Examples; Weighted and signed graphs.

Le3 - Thu Oct 10, 2024 Weighted and signed graphs; The adjacency matrix: symmetries and conventions; Sparsity; Bipartite graphs; Projections; Distances, Small world, Connectivity, Bridges, Wooclap on project topics.

Le4 - Fri Oct 11, 2024  Building my personal network; Selecting the data; Defining the network, network boundaries; Random sampling, reputational and positional/structural approaches; Social capital, Entativity, Ostracism, Cohesion, Borokerage, Granovetter's weak tie theory, Weak ties, bridges, and structural holes, Efficient and effective networks. 

Le5 - Thu Oct 17, 2024 Brainstorming session on project topics and group forming. 

Le6 - Thu Oct 24, 2024 Centrality measures; Degree for undirected and directed networks; Average degree; Authorities and hubs; Degree distribution; Log-log plot of the degree distribution; Power-law and scale-free networks; Explaining the pwoer-law with preferential attachment and attactiveness.

Le7 - Fri Oct 25, 2024  Structural holes: Examplary of study linking personality, network and performance. 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; scholar.google.com and www.webofscience.com or www.scimagojr.com

Le9 - Thu Nov 7, 2024 Project ideas presentation: 5) Natural disaster and climate change, 6) Veganism.

Le10 - Fri Nov 8, 2024 Language and social cognition; linguistic cues of psychological processes and inter group relations: focus on linguistic abstraction, generic masculine, derogatory labels and reappropriation, order and primacy effect; 

Le11 - Thu Nov 14, 2024 Semantic networks: Issues about text retrieval, mining, and coding; Overview of properties coded with LIWC dictionary.

Le12 - Fri Nov 15, 2024 Project discussion with an emphasis on literature search: 1) Overtourism, 2) Trad wives, 3) Abortion, 4) Privacy, 5) Climate change, 6) Veganism.

Le13 - Thu Dec 21, 2024 Invited talk by Magda Formanowicz on Agency

Le14 - Fri Nov 22, 2024 - 16:30pm @ Classroom Ce, DEI, via Gradenigo 6/b  Presentation of interdisciplinary projects to engineers/data scientists 

16:30 Intro,

16:35 Overtourism, 

16:45 Trad wives, 

16:55 Abortion, 

17:05 Privacy,

17:15 Climate change,

17:25 Veganism,

17:35 Discussion and group forming,

18:00 End.

Le15 - Thu Nov 28, 2024 PageRank centrality: the random walk rationale; Teleportation; Pagerank versus degree; Examples; Local PageRank and topic specific PageRank; Examples of application; Other centrality measures: betwenness, closeness.

Le16 - Fri Nov 29, 2024 Social influence, contagion, homophily, and polarization; Le Bon's social contagion; Homophily in peoples' networks according to different behaviours: distinguishing homophily from contagion; Coviello's experiment on mood and weather as an example of contagion; Bond's example of contagion on elections through Facebook: 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 5, 2024 Community and topic detection; Conceptual picture of a network and its relation to Granovetter's theory; The core-periphery model; Overlapping communities; The Louvain algorithm; BERTopic; Using community detection: topics interdependencies.

Le18 - Fri Dec 6, 2024 The CAN (Causal Attitude Network) model conceptualizes attitudes as networks consisting of evaluative reactions and interactions between these reactions; Correlation networks. 

Le19 - Thu Dec 12, 2024 Feedback from IPs; Polarisation, homophily, selective exposure; Echo chambers and filter bubbles; Examples; Polarisation in pro-life/pro-choice networks; Assortative and disassortative networks;. 

Le20 - Fri Dec 13, 2024 Reddit Lab: how to scrape data from social networks by using R. by Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara

Le21 - Thu Dec 19, 2024 Gephi Lab: how to give networks a graphical representation through the open-source software Gephi https://gephi.org/. by Lejla Dzanko

Le22 - Fri Dec 20, 2024 IP projects feedback.