Centrality I

Guest Speaker: Dan Halgin

Centrality refers to a family of structural concepts relating to a node's position in the network. Today's class will focus on the Big Four: degree, closeness, betweenness, eigenvector.

Topics

• main aspects of centrality

Reading
 

• Freeman, L. C. (1979.) Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification. Social Networks, 1 pp. 215-239. [pdf]

• Forrest R. Pitts, 1978/79. The Medieval River Trade Network of Russia Revisited. Social Networks 1:285-292 [pdf] [summary]

Bibliography

• Centrality bibliography

Tutorials

• Borgatti et al. Analyzing Social Networks. Centrality

• Hanneman & Riddle. Chap. 10

Exercises

• Centrality in UCINET
• DeJordy day 4 lab

Slides

• Lectures/centrality.pdf

Handouts

• Eigenvectors

Study Questions

• Are there any properties of networks/position that would not be considered social capital?