Social Network Analysis: Data Collections

Before social network analysts can start to examine social networks, one critical task is to collect social network data. Where do social network data come from? What steps we need to take to collect social network data? This chapter strives to answer those questions, it begins with a clarification note of the key differences between two distinctive social network analysis design: ego centric network (or ego-net) and whole network studies. It then moves on to describe topics of sampling and boundary specification in collecting the whole social network data. It also discusses methods to mine online social media data with Application Programming Interface (API), and web scrapers. This chapter ends with an introduction of a particular engineer product called Intelligent Cyber Argumentation System (ICAS), which was designed and implemented by an interdisciplinary team of computer/data scientists/engineers and social scientists through an NSF funded project Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted (DART: https://dartproject.org/ ).