Understanding Large Temporal Networks and Spatial Networks: Exploration, Pattern Searching, Visualization and Network Evolution

1Temporal and Spatial Networks

Our primary concern is understanding both large temporal and large spatial networks in ways going beyond simple general descriptions of their structures. For the former, doing this amounts to discerning the structure(s) of such networks as they develop over time, and grasping the social forces driving these changes. For the latter, it involves understanding spatial social patterns and the processes by which they were generated. For both network types, these two broad tasks – delineating structures and understanding their formation – go hand in hand: doing one without the other leaves our understanding of these networks incomplete. However, in order to understand the impact of social forces, it is necessary to know the structure(s) of networks. We focus, initially, on outlining foundational network concepts in Chapter 2. A detailed presentation of methods for analyzing citation networks is included in Chapter 3. In the remaining chapters, we study how temporal networks change and social phenomena are distributed over spatial networks. We provide substantively based interpretations of the results we obtain. As is usually the case, for us, creating these understandings was an iterative process where empirical results led to substantive understandings which, in turn, triggered further analyses. We report results of these analytic sequences but without reporting the iterations.

1.1 Modern Social Network Analysis

Freeman (2004) argued that four features ...