Communication and Social Networks (Spring 2021)/Final project

Video explaining the final project + example code

Based on your work in this class, you will craft a pitch to help an organization make sense of their own social networks and craft a portfolio of your work with data drawing on the previous labs and readings to support your pitch.


 * 1) Select a potential employer, and research them to identify the pressing organizational issues facing them as a company.
 * 2) Write a document for a potential employer that
 * 3) Introduces you and states your professional objectives. (1 paragraph)
 * 4) Makes the case for the most important problems facing this organization or industry based on your research. Be sure to cite any literature that you use. (1 paragraph)
 * 5) Explains how a network approach and your expertise in particular can help address the sorts of problems facing their organization and industry
 * 6) * Include at least three distinctive insights (e.g., my expertise in network analysis can help you identify opinion leaders in this organization).
 * 7) * Include example visualizations of each insight from your own work (or create new visualizations).
 * 8) * Include ideas from and references to the class readings to make your case.
 * 9) Closes with a request for a meeting to learn more about their organization.
 * 10) Compile and submit your document on Brightspace

While I want everyone to write and turn in their own document, I encourage you to help each other with the visualization portions and to ask questions on the group Slack channel. I expect that the final document will be ~5 pages long (maybe longer if you want to showcase a lot of visualizations)

Format
If you are feeling adventurous, you are welcome to write this in an R Markdown file, with code and explanations combined in the same file. The next best option is to export your plots in RStudio and import them in a Word document.

Sample Business Data
If you would like, you can use data from a real organization. There are some great options of network data files already in igraph format at https://github.com/schochastics/networkdata.

I created an example of how to load this data, and how to run some simple network metrics and visualizations here.

Examples
This project is similar to a final project that Josh Barbour assigns to his class. View examples of their projects on Brightspace.