Population-scale Social Network Analysis

Keynote Frank Takes at IC2S2 2021

Missed the keynote by Frank Takes at IC2S2 2021? You can view the full presentation here.

Abstract

The use of country-wide administrative register data enables the discovery of population-scale insights into contemporary problems such as segregation, inequality and poverty. This talk considers responsibly anonymized population-scale social network data on all 17 million inhabitants of the Netherlands. I will discuss how the type of formal links in this social network require one to critically rethink network analysis concepts such as the unit of analysis, measurement errors effects and the boundary specification problem. Moreover, I will show how the analysis of a population-scale multilayer network of family, work, school, household and neighborhood relations enables us to revisit the well-known small-world phenomenon from a unique angle. Finally, I outline the possibilities of population-scale network data for various areas of social science research.

About Frank Takes

Frank Takes is head of the Computational Network Science Lab at Leiden University and research fellow in computational social science at the University of Amsterdam. He is co-director of the Platform for Population-scale Social Network Analysis (POPNET) and board member of the Dutch Network Science Society (NL NetSci). His research deals with methods for large-scale social network analysis, with a focus on applications in economic networks, scientific collaboration networks and population-scale social networks.