Identifying other research opportunities

When doing any kind of network analysis, it is important to know that there is always more that you can do; for instance, we could do the following:

• We could embed additional information into the graph, such as weights or node types (teacher, student, revolutionary, and so on)
• We could color nodes by node type for easier identification of communities
• We could size nodes by the number of degrees or the centrality score to make it easier to identify important nodes
• We could use directed networks to understand the directionality of information sharing

There is always more that you can do, but it is important to know that enough is enough. You should use what you need. For this chapter, I originally got stuck trying to do too much, and I lost time trying to figure out how to do things that weren’t actually all that important to teaching this topic. Keep it simple and add only what you need and what is helpful. Add...