FAQ+-+What+are+the+origins+of+social+network+analysis?

The explosive growth of social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace has brought social network analysis and mapping to the forefront of public attention. But the field has a long history that traces its roots back to the early part of the twentieth century, emerging from work in a range of different disciplines — sociology, anthropology, psychology, geography, mathematics, computer science, and economics.

In the early 1930s, Jacob Moreno developed the sociogram, the first formal approach for mapping relationships within a group of people. Sociograms diagrammed clusters of individual points connected by straight lines and helped identify community leaders and outsiders. In the 1950s, J.A. Barnes coined the term “social networks"; he studied social ties in a Scandinavian fishing village and saw that people’s social lives could be envisioned as “a set of points, some of which are joined by lines” to create a “total network” of relationships.

Since the early sociograms and social network studies, the field has grown immensely in both scientific sophistication and popular application. Social network analysis (SNA), as it is practiced today, produces both visual and mathematic analysis of human relationships. Rather than treating individuals (people, organizations, or other entities) as the sole unit of analysis, SNA focuses on the connections between them and shows how the structure of these ties affects individuals and their relationships.

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