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• Exeter Centre for Social Networks (ECSN)
• Training and events
• Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Text Analysis

Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Text Analysis (POSTPONED)

Our workshop is currently postponed until further notice, new dates for this are yet to be determined.

Instructor: 

Jesse Michael Fagan, PhD

Jesse Fagan is a Lecturer of Data Analytics in the Management Department at the University of Exeter Business School. His current work focuses on the analysis of social networks and natural language processing to predict organizational behavior and outcomes. He has published work in on organizational mergers, social network analysis, and virtual worlds.

Contents and objectives:

An ocean of data is created each day in the form of digital traces - emails, tweets, discussion forums, patents, legal documents, etc. This data is a tremendous resource for testing or exploring social theories in microscopic, longitudinal detail. Attendees of this workshop will learn how to integrate text analysis and social network analysis. The workshop will focus on the different ways of extracting linguistic information from text, drawing relationships between people / organizations and documents / language. In brief at the end of the day, workshop attendees should expect to be able to know or accomplish the following:

• Basic steps in processing text information to use in analysis

• Use topic models, sentiment analysis, and linguistic behavior as node attributes

• Create visualizations that map what people talk about to who they talk to

• Create networks of documents and words and compare them

• Use text and network features to predict and model outcomes and behavior

Software resources:

• R / RStudio

Prerequisites

• A basic understanding social network analysis

• Experience using R is helpful, but not required

Bibliography

• A selection of published works on networks and language:
• Aral, S., & Van Alstyne, M. 2011. The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-off. The American Journal of Sociology, 117(1): 90–171.
• Srivastava, S. B., Goldberg, A., & Manian, V. G. 2018. Enculturation trajectories: Language, cultural adaptation, and individual outcomes in organizations. Management Science, 64(3): 1348–1364.
• Pennebaker, J. W., Mehl, M. R., & Niederhoffer, K. G. 2003. Psychological aspects of natural language. use: our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54: 547–577.
• Hannigan, T., Haans, R. F. J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser, V., et al. 2019. Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data. Academy of Management Annals, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0099.