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.

Select a potential employer, and research them to identify the pressing organizational issues facing them as a company.
Write a document for a potential employer that
1. Introduces you and states your professional objectives. (1 paragraph)
2. 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)
3. Explains how a network approach and your expertise in particular can help address the sorts of problems facing their organization and industry
  - Include at least three distinctive insights (e.g., my expertise in network analysis can help you identify opinion leaders in this organization).
  - Include example visualizations of each insight from your own work (or create new visualizations).
  - Include ideas from and references to the class readings to make your case.
4. Closes with a request for a meeting to learn more about their organization.
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.