David Easley and Jon Kleinberg have a textbook coming out called Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. It looks great, and for now you can download a preprint of the whole thing for free. Cornell, home of founding co-blogger Matthew Brashears seems like a great place to do work on networks.
Robert Hanneman (with coauthors Riddle and Izquierdo) also has a free textbook or three for you to download. I won’t try to summarize any of these books since you are just a click away from viewing them, but I will point out that they aren’t competitors… they each have a lot of unique material.
See more discussion of social network curriculum/pedagogy at Jimi’s post here.
Question for you Michael:
Do you believe that Network Analysis will creep its way into undergraduate intro. textbooks in the next 10 years or so?
Brian, I know little about intro soc. textbooks so I’ll leave such predictions to others.
I certainly think intro soc. textbooks should discuss network analysis (alongside other methodologies) and provide some examples throughout the substantive chapters of the book.
On the up side, some intro texts get re-done every year or two. With all the popularity of social networking (including blogging!), one might think that some key findings on friendship networks, job searches, social support, “contagion” and the like might make into texts. From there, maybe it’s a short step to an actual chapter on social networks (?)
On the down side, most folks teaching intro soc have never been exposed to social networks, and might not want to teach it. And, our texts are really, really slow to change in any substantive way.
I’m going to try to use some chapters from the Carrington Handbook of Social Networks (being assembled) in my undergrad course in the Spring.
A couple more thoughts…
Thanks very much for Easly/Kleinberg lead — I’m looking for something for an undergrad course in the Spring.
The text of mine that’s cited is actually only with Riddle. I did a separate piece with Izquierdo on using Mathmatica for network analysis basics. There is also an old book of mine on systems dynamics (simple differential equation models).
Another recent and shorter article, which can be used as some sort of theorization : http://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/tracing-and-reconfiguring-networks-to-build-a-political-alternative/
(available on request)