While affiliation networks are useful for representing the full structure of many-to-many relationships, it is sometimes easier to work with standard single-mode networks. This might be the case if an analysis focuses on a particular type of node, or if a necessary technique is only available for single-mode networks, or if the affiliation network has too many nodes to visualize clearly. Luckily, it is possible to create single-mode networks out of an affiliation network using a process called projection. And, as you might expect, NetworkX makes it easy.
Single-mode networks built from affiliation networks are called co-affiliation networks, because the nodes are connected by an edge if they have common affiliations. There are several types of projections that are used to create co-affiliation networks, but they all revolve around the same idea: connecting nodes with...