Social Network Analysis: Historic Circles of Friends and Acquaintances

Abstract

The sixth, and final, of the Digital Humanities assignments, Social Network Analysis, is presented in this chapter, beginning with a brief introduction to network analysis as an analytical method of great interest to humanities programmers. The assignment description (written in a form and with a point-of-view suitable to be copied and pasted into materials given directly to students), required support files and resources, skills utilized in the assignment (which include library imports in Python, object instantiation and use, and dictionaries as data structures), assignment management techniques and issues (mostly involved with helping students learn about the concept of code re-use, and how to install and review documenation for Python libraries), atomic code for the assignment (the in-class tutorial), expected output from student submitted work in this assignment, and variations for a number of student skill levels are provided.