International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The term “network” denotes a central concept in the social sciences. The underlying idea of a structure that consists of elements (sometimes also called points, nodes, or vertices) and their relations (called lines, edges, arcs, or connections) has been used to illustrate and explain such diverse things as human action, information exchange in communication processes, peer groups, social formations, organizational coordination, markets and even whole societies, to name but a few of the application contexts. In many of these cases, the term “network” is used in a purely metaphorical sense, which remotely refers to a web-like phenomenon. However, it can also stand for a clearly defined analytical concept, which can be described on the basis of a formal mathematical language. By applying mathematical network logics to the analysis of social phenomena, researchers gain insight into their structures, i.e., the arrangement of the constituent elements and their connections. Furthermore, social phenomena can be compared on the basis of their (structural) network properties when using a standardized mathematical description language and uniform measurements. As with many approaches in social sciences, there is not just one historical source of network analysis. Some of the mathematical and logical foundations were laid in the eighteenth century with so-called graph theory. As early as 1737, ... log in or subscribe to read full text