Research Methods and Procedures

In this chapter, we are going to apply specific techniques of SNA to analyze the BX-dataset (The data that was crawled from the Book Crossing website in 2004) (Fig. 19) and dig out some results such as most positively-rated books (most popular books) and most active users and so on. Then, we are going to conduct the analysis of the user-user network, a sub-network that generates from partitioning the userpreference network. The analysis will take us to apply techniques related to centrality degrees to discover most important figures in that sub-network, in addition to the egonetwork analysis and the m-slice analysis.

Keywords: Affiliation networks, network analysis, centrality measures, ego network, brokerage roles, m-slice analysis, Centrality measures, Network visualization, network partitioning, user-preference, nodes, degree, Statistical analysis, Mother-network, Data pre-processing, Bookcrossing.