A great free Social Network Analysis Tool
Stumble It!I have been checking out Agna a neat little free social network analysis (SNA) tool which runs on both PCs and Macs (on top of Java). Agna allows social network data (directly input or imported from external systems) to be displayed, manipulated and analysed graphically in a number of ways/styles and is very easy to install and use. Agna is a great way to get into SNA.
Here are some example Agna screenshots
Agna allows 3 key types of social network analysis (explained in detail in an excellent 8-page introductory PDF paper by Marius Benta downloadable from the Agna website):
Centrality
Centrality as an actor-level coefficient reflects the degree of access to information (or resources) of an actor and hence the probability of that actor to acquire a leadership position in the group. As a network-level coefficient, centrality measures the distribution of information (or power) within the group.
Sociometric Coefficients
In a communication network, actor-level sociometric coefficients measure the level of communicational activity of a specific actor.
Distance-Related Coefficients
This category of measures is based on the concept of geodesic distance. Given two nodes of a network, say node A and node B, the geodesic distance from A to B is the length of the shortest possible path from A to B.
My only complaint is that it would be great if Agna an API (Application Programming Interface) or set of web-services which applications could use to embed Agna within their own software.
For a great introduction to social networks and social network analysis see these two articles by Richard Cross:
Social Network Analysis: an introduction
Social Network Analysis in practice
Tags: Social Networks, social software
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Another great (and free!) tool I recently discovered for analyzing social networks is "Social Networks Visualiser" or SocNetV. It has a very nice gui, runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, supports GraphML and .net files, and is swift to compute centralities and distances. It does some network layout, as well. Check it out:
http://socnetv.sourceforge.net