#### What is Social Network Analysis?

A Social Network is the social structure which facilitates communication between a group of actors (individuals or organizations) that are related somehow (i.e. by common interests, shared values, financial exchanges, friendship, dislike, etc). For instance, your friends and you form a social network. But, social networks operate on many more levels, from family relations and disease spreading up to the level of company strategies, social movements or even nations. Furthermore, research in many scientific areas has shown that social networks are important when we study the way problems are solved, diseases are spreaded, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a beautiful blend of Sociology and Mathematics, composed of various interdisciplinary techniques for the study of such social networks. SNA researchers conceptualize social relationships in terms of nodes and edges (links) in mathematical graphs. Nodes represent the individual actors within the networks, while edges visualise the relationships between those actors. The result is graph-based structures which are often very complex.

#### What is SocNetV?

Social Networks Visualizer (SocNetV) is our project to build a flexible and user-friendly, cross-platform tool for the analysis and visualisation of social networks, targeting primarily the researcher. SocNetV lets you construct social networks with a few clicks on a virtual canvas or load networks of various formats (GraphML, GraphViz, Adjacency (Sociomatrix), Pajek, UCINET, etc) and modify them to suit your needs.

The application can compute all the basic network properties, such as graph diameter, and distances (shortest path lengths), as well as more advanced structural statistics, such as node and network centralities (i.e. Closeness , Betweeness, Graph, etc), clustering coefficient, etc.

Various layout algorithms (i.e. Energy-based, in circles and in levels according to various centrality indeces) are supported for meaningful visualisations of your networks. Furthermore, random networks (Erdos-Renyi, Watts-Strogatz, ring lattice, etc) can be created with a few clicks.

SocNetV is a work in progress and is being developed in C++ and Qt, an open-source GUI development toolkit from Nokia. Our primary target platform is Linux, but you can compile and run SocNetV on OS X and Windows as well, as long as you have Qt4 libraries installed.

#### Installation

The latest version of SocNetV can be found at http://socnetv.sourceforge.net. It is distributed both in source code and binary packages for Linux distributions, and executables for Windows. Mac OS X users may install SocNetV using the Fink project. See instructions below.

##### Source Code Compilation

In any Linux distribution, to compile SocNetV from source code, you need the Qt4 development libraries installed - most Linux distros offer Qt4 via their package manager (i.e. Synaptic in Ubuntu). You also need QtWebKit development files. For instance, in openSUSE 11+ and Debian-based distros, install libQtWebKit-devel and libqt4-webkit, respectively. If you have Qt4 and QtWebKit installed, download the archive with the source code from the Downloads menu, untar it, enter the new directory, and compile with the following commands:

tar zxfv SocNetV-0.XX.tar.gz
cd socnetv
./configure
make
sudo make install

In Windows, to compile SocNetV, you need to have installed Qt4 development files, and a compiler, like MinGW. If you wish you can avoid compilation, by using the Windows XP executables we offer (see below).

To avoid compiling in Linux, we also offer binary packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and openSUSE available from the project's website. Debian users may prefer the SocNetV version in the debian unstable repository.

##### Debian packages

For Debian & Debian-derived distros, a (not always updated) version of SocNetV is in the 'unstable' repository (thanks to Serafeim Zanikolas). Add the line:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main

to your sources.list; save it, then type in:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install socnetv

##### Ubuntu packages

Ubuntu users may use our repository. All you have to do is add the following lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dimitris-kalamaras/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/dimitris-kalamaras/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Then save it, exit the text editor, and type in:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install socnetv

This repository is signed with 61AE869C37A4FCC5A73FD02EE088941209CFE071 OpenPGP key. Until you add the PPA's key to your own system, you'll see warnings that you're downloading from an untrusted source. To add our PPA's key to your system, open a terminal and enter this command:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 61AE869C37A4FCC5A73FD02EE088941209CFE071

If you want more information about keys and repository signing in Ubuntu, read the official instructions.

##### openSUSE packages

For openSUSE and Novell SLED, you may download binary RPM packages from our our repository. When you download the RPM, become root user and install it, like this:

su rpm -ivh socnetv-0.80.1.i586.rpm

##### Fedora packages

Fedora and RedHat users may download binary RPM packages from our our repository. Afterwards, become root user and install the package, i.e.:

su rpm -ivh socnetv-0.80-1.i586.rpm

##### Mandriva packages

Mandriva users may download binary RPM packages from our our repository. To install the package, use commands like these:

su rpm -ivh socnetv-0.80-2.1.i586.rpm

##### Gentoo builders

Markos Chandras (hwoarang) added SocNetV into the 'qting-edge' overlay, which also houses new Qt4 and KDE4 software. To install the qting-edge overlay type in this command:

layman -a qting-edge

##### Windows executables

To run SocNetV version 0.70 and later in Windows XP/Vista, just download the latest SocNetV zip for Windows from the Downloads menu, unzip it, and double-click on the "socnetv" executable. The program will run immediately. For older SocNetV versions, you need to install Qt4 libraries for Windows. Warning: the Windows version is not properly tested. But feel free to notify us for any bugs you encounter!

##### Mac OS installation

If you are a Mac user, you can install and run SocNetV using the Fink project tools. Fink is like "bringing linux to Mac" - you install some base programs and files, and then you can install applications like SocNetV. Please note that, we do not own a Mac so everything that follows is just an outline of what you should do to run SocNetV in your Mac! Anyway, SocNetV is in the unstable section of Fink. Therefore, you will need to configure Fink to use the unstable. You'll find usefull instructions for this here: http://www.finkproject.org/faq/usage-fink.php#unstable After that, you only need commands like these (I think!):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install socnetv

##### Development version

If you want to test the latest/current development version of SocNetV, check it out using this command (you need the Subversion package):

svn co http://socnetv.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/socnetv/trunk

or download the latest tarball from the Sourceforge SVN repository. Then, type in the commands:

cd trunk
chmod +x configure
./configure
make
socnetv

Please note that this version is not always stable.

#### Execution Options

If you run SocNetV from the command prompt, there are three (at the moment) options:

--version | -V

Displays the version of the program.

--help | -H

Displays a short help message.

file.net

The name of the file you want to open.