The Development of Social Network Analysis—with an Emphasis on Recent Events

In a recent book I reviewed the development of social network analysis from its earliest beginnings until the late 1990s (Freeman, 2004). There I characterized social network analysis as an approach that involves four defining properties: (1) It involves the intuition that links among social actors are important. (2) It is based on the collection and analysis of data that record social relations that link actors. (3) It draws heavily on graphic imagery to reveal and display the patterning of those links. And (4) it develops mathematical and computational models to describe and explain those patterns.