Chapter 1 Prerequisites

This is a set of course notes for SOCIOLOGY 3412: Social Networking. All examples are written in the R Statistical programing language. It is recommended that you use R-Studio as your IDE for this course as it is the one that will be demonstrated in lecture.

1.1 R

R is a statistical programming language that is popular in industry and acadamia. It is open source and has very powerful tools for analysis and visualization. I recommend running yourself through an online tutorial before the course begins. A popular one is run by DataCamp and is free and can be found here. However, there are a number of alternatives, all of which can be found on google.

1.2 STATNET and igraph

We will be using the following packages from the STATNET project:

install.packages('network')
install.packages('ergm')
install.packages('sna')
install.packages('EpiModel)

We will also on occasion make use of the igraph package:

install.packages('igraph')

1.3 networkdata and devtools

We will occasionally use packages created by the author and installed via github. To do this you will first need to install devtools:

install.packages("devtools")

Then you can install the networkdata package and other packages created for this course as needed, e.g.,

library(devtools)
install_github("zalmquist/networkdata")