Social Network Analysis (SNA) Resources
Posted on Sep 28, 2006 | Categories: Communities, Knowledge Management, Social Computing | 10 Comments
In the past I have been talking several times about one of my favourite topics related to Knowledge Management and social networks and that is the one about Social Network Analysis. As fascinating and enlightening as it is, lots of people seem to confuse it with Social Networking so after the long weblog post I shared yesterday I thought I would make a short one just sharing over here a few interesting links related to Social Network Analysis, a.k.a. SNA, that would certainly help folks clarify the idea at the same time that they could act as useful resources for future reference.
All of these links have actually been published just recently through the mailing list from actKM and you would be able to read some of the background behind them over there. Or just head over to those links themselves and read on. I know I have got a few other links related to SNA stored in my social bookmarking tools so I think that I would eventually be adding them to this weblog post as well as time goes by and be able to come up with a, hopefully, useful weblog post that I can revisit every now and then to check on those resources once again. Hope it has got the same purpose for you. So, here are the links:
a. A quick primer on Social Network Analysis: A weblog post created by Andrew Rixon, from Anecdote that provides a very handy, and short description, of what SNA is all about, and from where I have taken the graphic to illustrate this post. So all credit due to Andrew.
b. An SNA Sensemaking Activity- Preparing people to see: Another very helpful weblog post by Andrew where he actually gets to explain SNA through sensemaking. This is perhaps one of my favourite resources that explains some of the major benefits from doing Social Network Analysis.
c. Social Networks Analysis and Sensemaking: And talking about some other interesting resources, here you have got the Squidoo lens Andrew created around the same subject (Yes, I know, one of these days I have got to weblog about the superb Squidoo offering).
d. And, finally, one of the other resources that was shared just recently through actKM was this particular event that took place in May 2005 but which has got an incredible amount of different resources and presentation materials around Social Network Analysis: Theories and methods for understanding human social networks. You would agree with me that with that title we are bound to get ourselves busy with some interesting topics of discussion around the subject of SNA. I haven’t dived into the different presentations just yet, but this is one of the activities I am planning to start getting busy with over the course of the weekend. It sounds like it is going to be an interesting one!
Hopefully, I may be able to weblog on some of them at a later time. We shall see how that goes.
So as you have been able to see lots of different and interesting resources around the world of Social Network Analysis and which will hopefully help people get a much better idea of what they are and how they differentiate with social networks. Oh, and before I forget, if you know of other resources you would want to recommend to help add on further into this topic (Yes! It is going to be an in-progress post, I am sure) around SNA feel free to append a comment with your suggestion(s) or contact me offline and I will add them into the main post. The more, the better.
Tags: Social Network Analysis, SNA, Social Networking, Social Networks, Sensemaking, actKM, Anecdote, Knowledge Management, Andrew Rixon
