Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Basic Vocabulary

In class on Tuesday (3/6), we briefly covered some of the foundational concepts of social networking. The main takeaway from this lecture was a handful of vocabulary terms. These terms are just a drop in the bucket of all the terms one could compile when discussing social networks and social network analysis.

social network: a patterned set of relationships between two or more actors
actor (n) an entity in a relationship
social capital (n)  the resources—such as ideas, information, money, trust—available in and through personal and business networks
network tie (n)  the connection or relationship between actors
density (n)  reflects how many people in a network are connected (usually directly) to each other
network size (n) the number of nodes
activity (n) how participative a node is
influence (n) the potential to affect nodes
social network analysis (n)  the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, Web sites, and other information/knowledge processing entities


Some other terms related to this topic that I did not include in the lecture.
- centrality (n) the extent to which an actor is in the middle of the network
control (n) how much authority a node has over the flow of information
- access (n) how easily a node can get resources necessary to be successful in the organization
- dyad (n) two actors and the relational tie between them
- triad (n) a subset of a social network composed of three actors and the possible ties between them
As well as a few kinds of networks:
- communication network: the informal structure of an organization as represented in ongoing patterns of interaction, either in general or with respect to a given issue.
- information network: shows who goes to whom for advice on work-related matters.
- problem-solving network: indicates who goes to whom to engage in dialogue that helps people solve problems at work. 
- knowledge network: captures who is aware of whose knowledge and skills, and an access network shows who has access to whose knowledge and expertise.

2 examples of a sociograms:


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