SoNAR 2019 international workshop

The international workshop Social Network Analysis in Romania – SoNAR 2019 is organized by the Research Group on Graphs and Social Networks (GraphNets – an interdisciplinary research group of the University of Bucharest).

SoNAR 2019 is the third scientific event focused on social network analysis and organized by GraphNets, in Romania. In 2017, GraphNets, in collaboration with the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest and the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), organized the international workshop on Graphs, networks and digital humanities. In 2018, GraphNets organized the international workshop Analyzing multiple networks from diverse perspectivesthe workshops took place in Timișoara and Bucharest.

SoNAR 2019 revolves around the study of large networks (data collection, processing and analysis) and hosts lectures, presentations and a round table on various topics such as, for instance, co-authorship networks, transnational networks, or intra-organizational networks. Additionally, in the context of social network analysis, two important issues are also addressed: the means for data mining and processing as well as the mixture between machine learning and social statistics.

The keynote address at the SoNAR 2019 is given by Jürgen Lerner (University of Konstanz, Germany). Jürgen Lerner is professor of algorithms with specific research interests in the area of social network analysis, open peer-production, networks with positive and negative ties, computational social science and statistical network modelling.  

During SoNAR 2019, preliminary results of the iCoNiC research project will be reported. These results will be afterwards explored and discussed under the format of a round table. This input is expected to support policy-makers and university top management, in Romania or EU, in tailoring their public policies’ formulations in the field of science.

The booklet is available here.

SoNAR 2019 is endorsed by the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work (The University of Bucharest), the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (the Social Science Division). The organization of SoNAR 2019 is also supported by the Research Center in Applied Ethics.

SoNAR 2019 is supported by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) through the research grant Longitudinal analysis of coauthorship networks and citations in academia (iCoNiC) – code: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0362 (details on https://iconic.unibuc.ro/)

ICONIC on air at the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation

Gabriel Hâncean, the principal investigator of the iCoNic project, was invited by Corina Negrea, science journalist, to give an interview on social networks in general, and about iCoNic project in particular, for Radio România Cultural, the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation’s second national channel. Gabriel also talked about the activities that will take place soon both in Timișoara, at the Romanian Sociologist Association Conference Living in a Liquid Society and in Bucharest, at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. All of these are part of the iCoNic international workshop Analyzing multiple networks from diverse perspectives, a series of conferences about the influence of social networks.

Firstly, Gabriel talked about what are social networks and how they shape our day-by-day life. People are different, so our social networks. What it counts here is that individuals are their own engineers of their social web (composed by social ties) and that they have the power to control the possibilities and opportunities given by being part of a social network. Studying this type of subjects represents what GraphNets, the research group on graphs and social networks, does in its scientific research activity.

Secondly, he discussed the main objectives of the iCoNic project. The main research objective is to assess the extent to which co-authorship relations (structures) positively impact on the university researchers’ distributions of citations, in a longitudinal framework. He pointed out that in Romanian academic structures, there are few researchers who collaborate to each other and it becomes harder and harder to get funding in order to perform research.

The interview (in Romanian) is online here.