Although the concept of social networks has a pretty long history, starting at the beginning of the last century, social network analysis (SNA) became extremely popular only in the last decade, probably due to the success of huge social media sites and the availability of related data. In this chapter, we are going to take a look on how to retrieve and load such data, then analyze and visualize such networks by heavily using the igraph
package.
Igraph
is an open source network analysis tool made by Gábor Csárdi. The software ships with a wide variety of network analysis methods, and it can be used in R, C, C++, and Python as well.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics with some examples on the R ecosystem:
Loading and handling network data
Network centrality metrics
Visualizing network graphs