I am developing a data set that charts the relationships between rabbis in antiquity. I am now keeping this data in tabular form (rabbi x/term of relationship/rabbi y). Could anyone recommend a software package - preferably open source and not too difficult to use - that can help me visualize and analyze this data?
What is the best software package for social network analysis?
(8 posts) (8 voices)-
Shawn
MemberHi,
It depends on what exactly you'd like to do with the data. If it's a really nice basic visualization, and a few typical network statistics (like different kinds of centrality, modularity), then Gephi is probably a great place to start - http://gephi.org/ . You can upload file to it from a wide variety of formats.Otherwise, for more complicated analyses, I'd say go with UCINET http://www.analytictech.com/ucinet/ (which you can use for 30 days free). Indeed, you could analyse the data in UCINET and then visualize it in Gephi.
For learning UCINET, and social networks more generally, see Hanneman's text book at http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/
Have fun!
ShawnPosted 7 years ago Permalink -
Tom Brughmans
MemberHi,
In addition to the options Shawn mentioned you could consider:
- Pajek: a free alternative to UCINET, powerful social network analytical tools, plenty of free documentation on wiki and published (http://pajek.imfm.si/doku.php)
- Cytoscape: for visualisation and simple metrics, similar to Gephi (http://www.cytoscape.org/)
- Processing: for pretty webbased visualisation (http://www.processing.org/)I know from personal experience that taking up social network analysis software does not have to be hard, and it provides a fascinating look at historical data. Consider reading my recently published review article of a few archaeological and historical applications of network analysis on my blog (titled 'connecting the dots', third one down on bibliography page: http://archaeologicalnetworks.wordpress.com/bibliography/). And you might also want to read my critique to using social network analysis to understanding social relationships in the past (titled 'facebooking the past', first one on bibliography page: http://archaeologicalnetworks.wordpress.com/bibliography/).
I am extremely interested in learning about your work and results, do keep me posted!
Good luck with this!Tom
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
James Neal
MemberI've been using NodeXL in a visualization project of the DH community.
"NodeXL is a free, open-source template for Excel 2007 and 2010 that lets you enter a network edge list, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the Excel window. You can easily customize the graph’s appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph’s layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate graph metrics. Networks can be imported from and exported to a variety of file formats, and built-in connections for getting networks from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and your local email are provided."
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
yodj84@gmail.com
BlockedReplying to @msatlow@gmail.com's post:
If you are a student and need SNA software for your coursework, you can get NetMiner 4 coursework license for free for 6 months. It features statstics and visualization as well as SNA. And it's very easy to use. I think it is valuable to try. :-)
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
Jim
MemberYou might want to use Social Networks Visualizer from http://socnetv.sourceforge.net It is a open-source, cross-platform graphical application for analysis and visualization of social networks. It allows you to load or create and modify social networks in a canvas, rotate, zoom, change node attributes, analyse their social and mathematical properties and apply visualization layouts for relevant presentation in papers etc. Can create known social datasets automatically as well as random networks and small worlds. Computes basic graph properties, such as density, diameter, geodesics, connectedness, eccentricity, etc. It also calculates advanced measures for social network analysis such as centrality and prestige indices (i.e. closeness centrality, betweeness centrality, information centrality, proximity and rank prestige), triad census, cliques, clustering coefficient, etc.
Posted 4 years ago Permalink -
and1256
MemberYou may also want to consider using Polinode. At the moment, Polinode lets you not only visualize and analyze network data like Gephi, but also to collect network data via highly-flexible relationship surveys. You are also able to import network data for analysis from an Excel file or in JSON or GEXF format. If you are interested, you can check out a short video at our website (full disclosure: I am the founder):
Posted 3 years ago Permalink
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