Structure-based Network Analysis

S.E. Hackney (University of Pittsburgh)

This video describes the process of taking a website, in this case one of Ufology, and then running a structure-based network analysis on it. The video discusses how to capture and analyze the structure of a website to then compare it with social structures or other projects on similar topics. The video describes steps needed to scrape a website, clean the data, and then analyze it with the network analysis tool Gephi.

Further Reading and Resources

Adamic, L. A. (2009). “The social hyperlink.” In Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia (HT ‘09). Paper presented at ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-2. This article delves into the relationships between websites which are manifested through networks of links between sites, and proposes that such links are a form of social community building within related pages.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes. “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment.” In International Handbook of Internet Research, 97–117. Springer, Dordrecht, 2009. This article introduces the field of Information Infrastructure Studies, and outlines the ways in which structure and infrastructure create both physical and digital worlds.

Weingart, Scott b. “Demystifying Networks.” the scottbot irregular, December 14, 2011. This is part one of nine (so far) blog posts explaining the basics of networks and network analysis from a Digital Humanities perspective.

July 3, 2019. Network Analysis, Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Text Mining and Analytics

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S.E. Hackney (University of Pittsburgh)

S.E. “Shack” Hackney is a PhD candidate in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information. They received their MSLIS with Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities from Pratt Institute’s School of Information in 2016. Their research focuses on structural inequality within digital infrastructure systems, particularly within the realm of digital character-encoding standards, and the ways that knowledge organization systems create physical and virtual spaces that privilege certain bodies and experiences over others.