Introduce yourself and works in progress

Hi everyone, I’m Bernie Hogan, a member of the Network Canvas team. I started this thread so that people using Network Canvas can get to know each other, share experiences, or signal a means for contact.

I’ve been doing network studies for about 20 years. The original participant-aided sociogram from my past lab in Toronto (NetLab, directed by Barry Wellman) was part of the inspiration for Network Canvas. I’m presently based in Oxford at the Oxford Internet Institute.

These days I’m focused on helping Network Canvas users understand the software better, appeal to our developers for key features, supporting our fundraising and grant initiatives, and applying the software with my graduate students.

If you are interested in learning more about the OII or have questions about creative ways to use Network Canvas, feel free to get in touch. I tend to show up at Sunbelt (intermittently), EUSN (pretty regularly), and related conferences in computational social science. I also have scripts on how to do things with Network Canvas like classroom studies that I hope to package and share. You can find out more about my work at OII | Dr Bernie Hogan.

Best,
Bernie

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HI Bernie, and everyone!

I’m Guy Harling, an associate prof at University College London who has been doing social network things for around a decade. More about me at Iris View Profile. I have been using Network Canvas for a few years now and may have recently described myself a Stan for the team/software. I’m looking forward to seeing the NetworkCanvas community grow through this discussion space.

I conduct social network research on health in Africa, mostly South Africa. At present I am leading two field studies using NetworkCanvas, one collecting longitudinal sociocentric data on youth and their important contacts (n~1500) in relation to HIV prevention (protocol paper: https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/7-164/v1) and another collecting complex household data in ~120 households where someone is living with cognitive decline (protocol paper: https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/7-220/v1). I would be very happy to discuss either, including implementation quirks - ask me about building a roster for 100,000 people!

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lovely to see you here, Guy. and quite appropriate that you’re one of the first to post in the new community. thanks for sharing about yourself and for being our forever stan!

Hi Guy!
Your research sounds very interesting, and I see common ground with the work we are doing that also relates to social network research on health in an African country.
I think it could be very valuable to have some of your insights on a study we are conducting which will try to do a whole network analysis of one village in the Comoros to better understand stable social structures that lead to close contacts and which may be relevant for leprosy transmission. Could we exchange on this, or can I ask you a few practical questions about using Network Canvas for this? :slight_smile:

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Hi everyone,

I am working on my dissertation methods. I learned about network canvas this past summer. I think it may be a good fit for my project. I wanted to ask how relatively easy it is to transfer the collected data over to the R environment? My training for analysis and network visualization has been in R, so that is where I would plan to do that part. But, it seems that network canvas may be a better fit than qualtrics as far as data collection. Any information is helpful. Thanks!

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Welcome, @Brandi_Armstrong!

We have a tutorial on Working with Network Canvas Data in R on our documentation website. It covers topics such as exporting data from Network Canvas, importing and cleaning data, recoding categorical variables, and analyzing data.

Please let us know if you have any specific questions.