Social Network Analysis in Scotland (SNAS) Group

Lead organiser of the Introduction to Social Network Analysis for Arts and Humanities half-day workshop, as part of Social Network Analysis in Scotland (SNAS) outreach activities. This was one of the first SNA workshops created specifically for Arts and Humanities PhD researchers based at Scottish universities. It was kindly funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) under the PGR Cohort development fund award.

We received over twent applications from postgraduates in Scotland and England from various disciplines, including history, linguistics, communication, digital humanities, culture and heritage. In the end, we were joined by thirteen participants, who travelled to Stirling from universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen besides Stirling.

I jointly delivered this introductory training involving several short presentations by SNAS committee members (Dr. Gil Viry (University of Edinburgh); Dr. Matjaz Vidmar (University of Edinburgh); Dr. Chamil Rathnayake (University of Strathclyde) and Kat Pruente (Stirling University)). I led the morning section introducting various network analysis software to analyse and visualise your data (R, Gephi, Visone and UCINET). In the afternoon, I facilitated the discussions where participants broke into in smaller groups by research topic (communications; historical archives; literature; heritage) and the SNAS committee rotated to offer advice and answer questions. Such discussions were so exciting that we run over time and several of the workshop participants expressed that they would be keen to have further workshops and roundtable events for PGRs in the nearer future hosted by SNAS.

Following the event I designed and run a survey among the attendees with overwhelmingly positive responses from all participants including mentions of the welcoming, collaborative and encouraging atmosphere as well as the usefulness of the presentations and discussion. Some participants are considering using SNA in their own research going forward.

See the full blog post for the event here