Lectures content

Le1 - Thu Oct 2, 2025 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 - Thu Oct 9, 2025 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. 

Le3 - Fri Oct 10, 2025 Brainstorming session on project topics and group forming. 

Le4 - Thu Oct 16, 2025 Networks as graphs; Directed and undirected networks; Examples; Weighted and signed graphs; Weighted and signed graphs; The adjacency matrix: symmetries and conventions; Sparsity; Distances. 

Le5 - Fri Oct 17, 2025 Small world, Connectivity, Bridges; Bipartite graphs; Projections; 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 power-law with preferential attachment and attactiveness.

Le6 - Thu Oct 23, 2025  Network of People, my personal network; ; Social capital, Entativity, Ostracism, Cohesion, Borokerage, Granovetter's weak tie theory, Weak ties, bridges, and structural holes, Efficient and effective networks. 

Le7 - Fri Oct 24, 2025 Project ideas presentations: 1) Perception of AI, 2) Jeff Bezos and inequalities, 3) Elections polarization, 4) Taylor Swift and deep fakes, 5) Barbenheimer.

Le8 - Thu Oct 30, 2025 Project ideas presentation: 6) K-pop soft power, 6) Charlie Kirk and online political discourse.

Network of people: sampling methods; example a research project on the relation between personality and productivity, via structural fetaures.

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

Le9 - Fri Oct 31, 2025 Semantic networks: Issues about text retrieval, mining, and coding; Overview of properties coded with LIWC dictionary.

Le10 - Thu Nov 9, 2025 Projects discussion: 1) Jeff bezos wedding, 2) Deep fake.

Semantic network; data cleaning, network construction; trasformation of text into data (dictionaries, automatic coding, handcoding)

Le11 - Fri Nov 7, 2025 Projects discussion: 3) K-pop, 4) Barbieheimer, 5) Artificial intelligence, 6) Charlie Kirk, 7) Elections polarization.

Le12 - Thu Nov 13, 2025 Linguistic inquiry word count - LIWC; 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.

Le13 - Fri Nov 14, 2025  Using community detection: topics interdependencies; BERTopic; Extracting sentiment: LIWC versus machine learning large language models; The BERTAgent example; How AI machines work with language: understanding ChatGPT.

Le14 - Mon Nov 17, 2024 - 8:30am @ Classroom Ce, DEI, via Gradenigo 6/b  Presentation of interdisciplinary projects to engineers/data scientists 

8:30 Intro,
8:35 Barbienheimer
8:45 Framing AI-generated celebrity deepfakes, 
8:55 Jeff Bezos wedding and the display of wealth and luxury, 
9:05 K-pop soft power,
9:15 Polarization effects in the disinformation on immigration,
9:25 Enthusiasm and skepticism towards AI,
9:35 Charlie Kirk's assassination,
9:45 Discussion and group forming,
10:00 End.

Le15 - Fri Nov 20, 2025 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.

Le16 - Thu Nov 27, 2025 Polarisation, homophily, selective exposure; Echo chambers and filter bubbles; Examples; Polarisation in pro-life/pro-choice networks; Assortative and disassortative networks; Robustness. 

Le17 - Fri Nov 28, 2025 The CAN (Causal Attitude Network) model conceptualizes attitudes as networks consisting of evaluative reactions and interactions between these reactions; Correlation networks. 

Le18 - Thu Dec 4, 2025 IP projects feedback; PageRank centrality: the random walk rationale; Teleportation; Pagerank versus degree; Collective action and network robustness to removal

Le19 - Fri Dec 5, 2025 Reddit Lab: how to scrape data from social networks by using R. by Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara

Le20 - Thu Dec 11, 2025 Gephi Lab: how to give networks a graphical representation through the open-source software Gephi https://gephi.org/. by Lejla Dzanko

Le21 - Fri Dec 12, 2025 IP projects feedback.

Thu Dec 18, 2025 Written pre-call