Abstract

This chapter introduces the paradigm of social network analysis [SNA]. Work in SNA predates the internet as many kinds of relationships of can be considered a network. The Internet, however, has made SNA particularly popular as most data on the web is relational, or composed of relations between ‘actors’ (the generic term for individuals. This chapter introduces the paradigm of social network analysis and proceeds to discuss means for data collection and analysis. It focuses on different levels of social networks from the personal network collected from a profile towards big data. For these networks, this chapter reviews data collection on a number of online venues such as Twitter, Facebook, email and the World Wide Web. We conclude with a review of standard metrics for the analyses of these kinds of networks and ethics for the collection of network data.