Group-level analysis and visualization of social networks

Abstract

Social network analysis investigates the structure of relations amongst social actors. A general approach to detect patterns of interaction and to filter out irregularities is to classify actors into groups and to analyze the relational structure between and within the various classes. The first part of this paper presents methods to define and compute structural network positions, i. e., classes of actors dependent on the network structure. In the second part we present techniques to visualize a network together with a given assignment of actors into groups, where specific emphasis is given to the simultaneous visualization of micro and macro structure. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.