Mark S. Handcock

"Social Networks: A Statistical View"

Presented to the Workshop on Statistical Inference, Computing and Visualization for Graphs, Stanford University, August 1-2, 2003.

In this talk we give an overview of social network analysis from the perspective of a statistician. The main focus is on the conceptual and methodological contributions of the social network community going back over eighty years. The field is, and has been, broadly multidisciplinary with significant contributions from the social, natural and mathematical sciences. This has lead to a plethora of terminology, and network conceptualizations commensurate with the varied objectives of network analysis. As a primary focus of the social sciences has been the representation of social relations with the objective of understanding social structure, social scientists have been central to this development. We review the forms of networks studied, mathematical models for social networks and visualization. Software tools for modeling and visualization are briefly described.