2.1: Introduction

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The basic idea of a social network is very simple. A social network is a set of actors (or points, or nodes, or agents) that may have relationships (or edges, or ties) with one another. Networks can have few or many actors, and one or more kinds of relations between pairs of actors. To build a useful understanding of a social network, a complete and rigorous description of a pattern of social relationships is a necessary starting point for analysis. That is, ideally we will know about all of the relationships between each pair of actors in the population.

The amount of information that we need to describe even small social networks can be quite great. Managing these data, and manipulating them so that we can see patterns of social structure can be tedious and complicated. All of the tasks of social network methods are made easier by using tools from mathematics. For the manipulation of network data, and the calculation of indexes describing networks, it is most useful to record information as matrices. For visualizing patterns, graphs are often useful.