Introduction

MyNetworkmap is a tool for social network analysis. You use it to record who is connected to whom, to turn those connections into a picture, and to compute measures that make the picture testable.

This manual describes every module step by step. All illustrations come from one continuous example you can rebuild yourself: a personal network of twelve people with the attributes Name, Gender, Age, Place of residence and Social role, and the relation types Friendship, Financial help, Conflict and Strength.

At the end of the manual there are two worked use cases: a network survey in a company run as an online questionnaire, and a school class project with several classes, a Kamada-Kawai layout and an interpretation of the computed centrality measures.

Conventional social research asks about attributes of people: how old is someone, what qualification do they hold, how satisfied are they? Network analysis asks instead about relations between people: who asks whom for advice, who trusts whom, who avoids whom?

Behind this lies a simple assumption with far-reaching consequences: much of what people do and achieve depends less on their attributes than on their position in the web of relations. Someone who mediates between two groups hears about new things earlier. Someone who knows nobody gets no help – however well qualified they are.

The three basic terms

Term	In MyNetworkmap	Meaning
Node	Actor	The acting unit: a person, an organisation, a place
Edge	Relation	The connection between two actors
Attribute	Attribute	A property of an actor or of a relation

Relations can be directed or undirected. “Anna asks Clara for advice” is directed – it does not follow that Clara also asks Anna. “Anna and Clara are siblings” is undirected; the relation necessarily holds both ways.

When a directed relation is returned, we speak of reciprocity. The share of reciprocated nominations is one of the most informative measures there is: in school classes it typically lies between 30 and 50 per cent, and children with many unreciprocated nominations are often those who feel socially worse off.

Important for working with MyNetworkmap: the directed/undirected distinction is not a formality. On the network map the same relation type needs two entries – one for the directed and one for the mutual ties – otherwise lines are missing from the picture.

Whole networks and ego-centred networks

There are two fundamentally different ways to collect network data.

A whole-network study looks at a bounded group – a school class, a department, a club – and surveys as many members as possible. The result is a closed network in which centrality, density and subgroups can meaningfully be computed. Because the group is known, you work with a roster: everybody picks from the same list. This is the route taken by use case 1 and use case 2.

An ego-centred study starts from individuals – the egos – and asks whom they deal with. The people named are the alteri. The group is not known in advance; respondents type the names freely. This suits situations without a definable population – a person's personal support network, for instance.

	Whole network	Ego-centred
Population	known and bounded	open
Name generator	predefined list	free input
Typical measures	centrality, density, cliques	network size, composition
Risk	non-response distorts the whole picture	recall effects

Careful – a pitfall of free input: when somebody types “Anna Berger”, MyNetworkmap creates a new actor. If five respondents name the same person, five actors appear. For a whole-network study the predefined name list is therefore not merely more convenient, it is necessary. See Online questionnaire.

What the measures mean

MyNetworkmap computes the classical measures of network analysis. All of them answer the question “how central is someone?” – but each in its own way.

Measure	What it counts	What it usually stands for
In-degree	How often is the actor named?	Standing, popularity, demand
Out-degree	How many others does the actor name?	Activity, seeking behaviour
Betweenness	On how many shortest paths between others does the actor lie?	Brokerage, control over information flow
Closeness	How short are the paths from here to everybody else?	Reach, reachability
Cliques	In how many fully connected subgroups is the actor?	Embeddedness
Density	Share of actual among possible relations	Cohesion of the whole group

The normalised variants (…Norm) divide the value by the largest theoretically possible one. Only this makes groups of different size comparable – an in-degree of 8 means something different in a class of 24 than in one of 40.

The single most interesting finding in network analysis is usually not the person with the highest degree but the one with high betweenness at moderate degree: someone with few but strategically placed connections. If that person drops out, the network falls apart. Use case 2 shows exactly this case.

How MyNetworkmap is organised

The application has three levels.

Organisation
└── Project
    ├── Attributes (actor and relation attributes, periods)
    ├── Actors and relations
    ├── Network maps
    └── Online questionnaires

The organisation is the billing and administration unit. The plan, the team accounts and the rights groups hang off it. See Organisation and team.

The project is the actual workspace. Every project has its own set of attributes, actors, relations, maps and questionnaires. None of it is shared between projects – even identically named attributes are technically different attributes. See Project.

The single most useful habit: before every import, every survey and every larger change, check which project is shown at the top of the sidebar. Almost every module writes into the currently active project.

The modules are the individual work areas. Which of them you see depends on your organisation's plan and on your role in the project. This manual describes the thirteen modules that appear in the sidebar of a standard installation. Depending on the plan there can be more – Email to actors, for instance; they are absent here because they were not enabled in the installation documented.

Module	Chapter	What for
Dashboard	Dashboard	Entry point and navigation
Projects	Project	Create and switch projects, manage members
Actors	Actors	Maintain actors and relations
Attributes	Attributes	Define properties and periods
Input masks	Input masks	Forms for entering actors
Network map	Network map	Draw, style, analyse
Online questionnaire	Online questionnaire	Build and run surveys
Survey statistics	Survey results	Response rate and answers
Import actors / relations	Import	Read in existing data
Export	Export	Get data out
Organisation and team	Organisation and team	Address, plan, team accounts
Profile	Profile	Your own user account

A typical workflow

Create a project – one per survey, per group or per point in time.
Define attributes – which properties do you collect, and which relation types? Attributes with predefined values are the basis of every later visualisation.
Get data in – through import, directly in the actor table, on the network map, or through an online questionnaire.
Build a network map – bring actors onto the map, select the relation types, run a layout.
Make things visible – tie colour, shape, size and sector to attribute values.
Compute – centrality measures are stored as new attributes and are then sortable, filterable and usable for visualisation.
Export – as CSV or GraphML for further processing, as an image, or as a finished PDF report about the map.

Conventions used in this manual

Bold marks labels that appear exactly like that in the interface.
Monospace marks input, file names and attribute names.
Callouts come in three levels: Note adds something, Tip speeds things up, Caution warns about data loss or a common misunderstanding.

A note on the interface language: some modules – notably Attributes, the online questionnaire and parts of the network map – are labelled in English even when the interface is set to German. This manual therefore names the controls by their English labels.