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ALA Resource Area
This site presents expanded references
for the three-part article The Link is the Thing appearing
in the August-October 2003 issues of DM Review. The article
suggests an approach to analyzing enterprise data called Associative Link
Analysis. The article is available at DM Review at: Part
I, Part
II, and Part
III. To request a full-color PDF version of this article, click here.
If we are missing relevant
citations, please inform us via email.
Thank you, Richard
Hackathorn
Background
Reading
 |  Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds
and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks, W.W. Norton &
Company, May 2002 (0393041530). Good summary by a science writer with
an outsider perspective but leans too heavily on his earlier writings
about Chaos Theory. |
|  Albert-László Barabási, Linked:
The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, May 2002
(0738206679). Historical flow using good illustrations. Emphasizes the
universality of the Small World property. |
|  Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The
Science of a Connected Age, W.W. Norton & Company; February
2003 (0393041425). Fun reading from the perspective of Social Network
Analysis. |
Further Reading
|  Stanley Wasserman & Katherine Faust,
Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge
University, November 1994. The bible for mathematical techniques
in SNA. |
|  Steven
Strogatz, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order,
Hyperion, March 2003. Focuses on synchronization and connectedness of
complex system; relatively little on the Small-World property. Clear
theoretical explanations with frank commentaries on key personalities.
See review
in Physics Today. |
|  Malcom
Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big
Difference, Little Brown, February 2000. Very readable |
|  Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The
Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing; October 2002. |
| Scott, Social Network
Analysis: A Handbook, Sage, March 2000. |
| Forse & Degenne, Introducing
Social Networks, August 1999. |
News Articles
| Decoding the Science of Synchronization, Nigel
Goldenfeld, Physics Today, June 2004. Brief but excellent review of
Steven Strogatz's book Sync. |
| Social Networking: My People Know Your People,
ComputerWorld, March 29, 2004. New services can make business
connections that lead to new deals. |
| Study Finds a Nation of Polarized Readers, NY
Times, March 13, 2004. Summarizes an article by Valdis Krebs who did a
Social Network Analysis of the purchasing patterns of 66 political
books based on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Results shows that
liberals buy liberal books and conservatives buy conservative books,
with only three 'bridging' books linking the two clusters together.
See the original article by Krebs here.  |
| New Services Are Minding Your Business, Washington
Post, March 4, 2004. Outlines privacy concerns about the Relationship
Mining vendors Spoke and Visible Paths. Draws parallels with Admiral
John Poindexter work on Total Information Awareness project, which was
terminated (or was it?). |
| From Butterfly Wings to Single E-Mail, Cornell
University News Service, Innovation
Reports, 16.02.2004. Prof Jon Kleinberg gave a talk on
"Community Structure of the Internet and WWW: Mathematical
Analyses" at AAAS in Seattle. Influence is more than degree or
shortest distance; it involves a diversity of paths that interconnect
groups. |
| Hub caps could cut vaccine costs, Nature,
December 17, 2003. Suggests a new approach to stopping epidemics by
treating a random selection of the acquaintances of individuals,
rather than the entire population or an exhaustive mapping of the
social network. |
| Six
Degress of Sales Separation, SearchCRM.com, November 21, 2003.
More on relationship mining vendors, such as Spoke Software, Inc. |
| Sinister
Beauty of Global Conspiracies, Eleanor Heartney, NYTimes, October
26, 2003. Editorial on Mark Lombardi's exhibit "Global
Networks" at the Drawing
Center in New York City. See press release
from gallery. |
| How
the Blackout Came to Life, Steven Strogatz, New York Times, August
25, 2003. Suggests that blackouts can be contain to smaller regions if
fast communications are supported throughout the power network. |
| We're
All on the Grid Together, Albert-László Barabási, New York
Times, August 16, 2003. Critique of the 2003 Blackout as rooted in
vulnerability due to interconnectivity. |
| Degrees
of Separation Are Likely More Than 6, Chang, NY Times, August 12,
2003. More in-depth review of article by Dodds, Muhamad & Watts. |
| There's
Six Degrees of Separation, CNN, August 8, 2003. Reports on the
article by Dodds, Muhamad & Watts. |
| Flash
Mobs Spread to Europe, Shmuelio, CNN, August 5, 2003. Also do a
search for 'flash mobs' with Google news. |
| New
Software for Sales People Maps Social Networks, Bergstein, The
Detroit News, August 4, 2003. Similar to WSJ article on August 4 but
more vendor pointers. |
| Six
Degrees of Exploitation, Bulkeley & Wong, WSJ, August 4, 2003.
Mentions Visible Paths, Spoke Software, and ZeroDegrees as Relationship
Mining vendors. |
Research
Articles
| Albert-László Barabási and
Bonabeau, Scale-Free Networks, Scientific
American, May 2003, pp 60-69. Concise nontechnical description of
the nature and diversity of scale-free systems. |
| Stanley Milgram, The
Small-World Problem, Psychology Today 1, 60-67, 1967. The original
article but see http://www.stanleymilgram.com/
for a resource site |
| Dodds, Muhamad & Watts, An
experimental study of search in global social networks. Science, 301, 827 - 829, (8
August 2003). Confirming Milgram's experiment via email. 61,000
individuals from 166 countries tried to contact 18 targets, creating
24,163 message chains, of which only 384 (3%) reached their target.
Chain length was estimated at 5 to 7 people. |
| M.E.J. Newman, The Structure
and Function of Complex Networks, SIAM Review 45, 167-256, 2003
available at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0303/0303516.pdf. Excellent
technical overview! |
| Valdis Krebs, The Social Life
of Routers: Applying Knowledge of Human Networks to the Design of
Computer Networks, The Internet Protocol Journal, Volume 3, Number
4, December 2000, 14-25. http://www.orgnet.com/SocialLifeOfRouters.pdf Nice
illustration of applying SNA concepts and techniques to a
communications network. |
| Mark Granovetter, The
Strength of Weak Ties, American Journal of Sociology 78, 1973,
1360-1380. |
| Original article on PageRank
are: L. Page, S. Brin, R. Motwani, T. Winograd, The PageRank
citation ranking: Bringing order to the Web, 1998, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/page98pagerank.html.
|
Related
Websites
| International Network for
Social Network Analysis (INSNA) at http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/. Good
links to research groups, conferences, tools, etc. Home to the SOCNET
Social Networks discussion forum and CONNECTION journal. |
| Journal on Social Networks at
http://www.socscinet.com/sociology/socnet/.
Principal academic journal in this area. |
| The Self-Organizing Networks
group at the University of Notre Dame (where Albert-László
Barabási resides) http://www.nd.edu/~networks. |
| The Small-Worlds Research
Project at Columbia University (where Duncan Watts resides)
http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/
. |
| Courses on Social Network
Analysis by Barry Wellman and Bonnie Erickson at the Sociology
Department, University of Toronto. Excellent sociology-grounded
courses are described here
and here,
as posted on SOCNET January 26
2004. |
| Computational Analysis of
Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie
Mellon University |
| p* Model site at http://kentucky.psych.uiuc.edu/pstar/
maintained by Stanley Wasserman at the University of Illinois. Popular
approach based on statistical modeling of exponential
random graphs. |
| The life and work of Stanley
Milgram at http://www.stanleymilgram.com/.
Hosted by Thomas Blass, a professor at the University of Maryland and
author of a forthcoming book on Milgram. |
| Orgnet.com at http://www.orgnet.com/ has great
examples in SNA applications by Valdis Krebs. |
| Oracle of Kevin Bacon at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/
is hosted by the University of Virginia. It illustrates how Kevin is
closely connected with thousands of other movie actors. Note the
discussion on who is the center of the Hollywood universe. |
| The Amazing Baconizer at http://baconizer.com/ is maintained
by Eric Promislow. Takes the similarity lists of Amazon to construct a
huge graph of relationships among books, CDs, DVDs, and videos. As of
August, 2003, it contained 499,686 items related by 4,106,435 links. |
Network
Analysis Tools
| Lists of Network Analysis tools
are given at:
|
| Analytic Technologies at http://www.analytictech.com/
offers a package of SNA tools, such as the popular UCINET for
Windows and NetDraw viz tool. Free trial is available. Good
instructional section to learn SNA concepts. Principal is Steve
Borgatti. |
| InFlow at http://www.orgnet.com/ is an
established product created Valdis Krebs. |
| Pajek at http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/
can analyze and display large graphs. Developed by Vladimir Batagelj
and Andrej Mrvar at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. |
| SIENA Windows-based tool
for longitudinal network analysis is available at http://stat.gamma.rug.nl/stocnet/.
It was developed by Prof. Tom A.B. Snijders at the
University of Groningen, The Netherlands. |
| SNA Package for R at http://legba.casos.ri.cmu.edu/R.stuff/
and managed by Carter Butts at CMU CASOS. Fully documented analysis
algorithms supported under the R
Statistical Computing Environment. |
| NETDOC at http://legba.casos.ri.cmu.edu/netstat/
which is a library for Visual C++. |
| AUTOMAP at http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/projects/automap/
is software for Network Text Analysis, supporting the extraction and
analysis of social systems from textual data, including stemming and
named entity recognition. Version 2.0 is now available through CASOS. |
| JUNG (Java Universal
Network/Graph Framework) at http://jung.sourceforge.net/
is a software library providing a common and extendible language for
the modeling, analysis, and visualization of graph data. Supported by
faculty and graduate students at University of California, Irvine (go
anteaters!). |
| antology from CakeHouse
Systems at www.cakehouse.co.uk.
Toolkit for defining, managing, and visualizing data from one or more
relational databases. Weak on metrics, but nice mix of social and
non-social data analysis along with strong integration capability of
large data sets. |
| NetMiner II from Cyram Co
Ltd in Korea at www.netminer.com.
Commercial product with free evaluation. Strong on analysis metrics
and visualization options. Complete but complex user interface. |
Graph Visualization Tools
| An overview of Graph
Visualization (viz) tools is given in: L. Freeman, Visualizing Social Networks, Journal of Social
Structure, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 4, 2000. |
| NetMap by NetMap
Analytics at http://www.netmap.com/
headquartered in Sydney. Doing a variety of commercial viz
applications since 1980's. |
| Analytic Technologies at http://www.analytictech.com/
offers a package of SNA tools, including the NetDraw viz tool. |
| TouchGraph graph viz tool
at http://www.touchgraph.com/
is an open-source development hosted at SourceForge.net. Nice Java
implementation with XML import and export.
| For a hands-on demo, try the
TouchGraph GoogleBrower,
which uses Google's similar-items linkage to browse the Web. Or,
try TouchGraph AmazonBrower
using Amazon’s ‘people who bought A also bought B’ linkage. |
|
| Other open-source graph viz
efforts within SourceForge.net are: JUNG (mentioned
above), Netron,
OpenJGraph,
Ruby Graph Library (RGL)
, Graph
Visualization Framework (GVF), and several more. |
| Commercial graph viz tools are: InXight, TheBrain,
and ThinkMap. |
Application
Areas
| Software Engineering
| Small World of Information
Laboratory at http://www.thesmallworlds.com,
founded by Alex Iskold. It aids in detecting dysfunctional
structures in software architectures and in guiding code
improvements. The company was acquired by IBM on July 10, 2003, to
be folded into their Rational product line. Sales of the old
product are suspended. |
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| USA Homeland Security
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