Group-Level Analysis and Visualization of Social Networks

Social network analysis investigates the structure of relations amongst social actors. A general approach to detect patterns of interaction and to filter out irregularities is to classify actors into groups and to analyze the relational structure between and within the various classes. The first part of this paper presents methods to define and compute structural network positions, i. e., classes of actors dependent on the network structure. In the second part we present techniques to visualize a network together with a given assignment of actors into groups, where specific emphasis is given to the simultaneous visualization of micro and macro structure. 1 Network Analysis Social network analysis (SNA) [54] is an established, active, and popular research area with applications in sociology, anthropology, organizational studies, and political science, to name a few. In a nutshell, SNA analyzes the structure of relations among (social, political, organizational) actors. While the typ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DFG
• Authors: Michael Baur, Ulrik Brandes, Jürgen Lerner, Dorothea Wagner
• Keywords: Actors, DFG 2009, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Network Analysis, Social Network Analysis