A new SNA centrality measure quantifying the distance to the nearest center

Abstract

In Social Network Analysis (SNA) centrality measures focus on activity (degree), information access (betweenness), distance to all the nodes (closeness), or popularity (pagerank). We introduce a new measure quantifying the distance of nodes to the network center. It is called weighted distance to nearest center (WDNC) and it is based on edge-weighted closeness (EWC), a weighted version of closeness. The WDNC will be tested on two Email networks of the R community, one of the most important open source programs for statistical computing and graphics. We will find that there is a relationship between the WDNC and the formal organization of the R community. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.