This course is designed to quite literally ‘make a science’ out of something at the heart of society: social networks. Humans are natural network scientists, as we compute new network configurations all the time, almost unaware, when thinking about friends and family (which are particular forms of social networks), about colleagues and organizational relations (other, overlapping network structures), and about how to navigate delicate or opportunistic network configurations to save guard or advance in our social standing (with society being one big social network itself). While such network structures always existed, computational social science has helped to reveal and to study them more systematically. In the first part of the course we focus on network structure. This looks as static snapshots of networks, which can be intricate and reveal important aspects of social systems. In our hands-on lab, you will also visualize and analyze a network with a software yourself, which will help to appreciate the complexity social networks can take on. During the second part of the course, we will look at how networks evolve in time. We ask how we can predict what kind of network will form and if and how we could influence network dynamics.
This course is part of the Computational Social Science Specialization
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About this Course
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Try Coursera for BusinessWhat you will learn
Define networks and discover the languages networks use.
Analyze a social network through data wrangling and visualizing a network.
Discuss what mechanisms generate networks.
Examine social networks analysis using case studies.
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Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Getting Started and Formalizing Networks
Social Network Analysis
Analyzing a Network with Software
Network Evolution
Reviews
- 5 stars79.79%
- 4 stars14.14%
- 3 stars2.52%
- 2 stars1.51%
- 1 star2.02%
TOP REVIEWS FROM SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS
It was really very good learning with coursera especially the mentors for social network analysis were excellent .!!!!!!!
This is a great intro to SNA course. In just only 5 weeks, this course will walk you through key concepts, brief logic of SNA, as well as examples from the real world. Highly recommended!
The course was good, but how to collect data for computation to study social networks (other than digital platforms should have been included.
I enjoyed this course. I began this courses wanting to gain a better understanding of social networks. I leave the course with a better understanding of effective decision making. Thank you.
About the Computational Social Science Specialization

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