Textbook
The textbook for CSC200 is Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, Cambridge University Press, 2010, by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. This will be the main source for the course. You will also need to rely on lecture material. For topics not covered in the text, we will provide more detailed lecture notes for your reference.
Additional Materials
We will supplement the text with secondary references and online materials as needed. These materials will be posted here. We will, of course, keep you apprised of any specific material you should read in class. We also list below other optional texts, notes, online materials, etc. that may be of interest.
Required Materials
- No required supplemental materials yet. These will be added as they arise.
Optional Background References
More links and references will be added as the course proceeds.
- A tutorial introduction on probability theory. Most of the basics should be familiar to you, but if you want to brush up/remind yourself of key concepts, please take a quick skim. In this course, we will use only basic concepts in discrete probability (and occasionally in advanced optional material continuous densities). We'll point you to relevant sections as we proceed. To begin the course, be sure you're comfortable with the very simple concepts in Section 1.2, Section 4.1 (conditional probability, though we will review Bayes rule in class in the second term), and Section 6.1.
- An excellent text, albeit at a more advanced graduate level, is Social and Economic Networks, Princeton University Press, 2008, by Matthew O. Jackson. This would be appropriate for anyone who wishes to delve more deeply and more technically to some of the topics discussed in the class.
- Several courses taught at other universities cover similar topics
(most, but not all, at a more advanced level). Some of potential interest:
- Networks, Cornell University. This course was the genesis of our text.
- Social Networks 101, Northwestern University.
Relevant Resources and other Fun Stuff
As we proceed through the course, we will sometimes discuss various research projects, ideas, software, etc. We will add links to appropriate material to this section. Feel free to browse these at your leisure.
- Netlogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment, that is suitable for (among other things) simulating a variety of network phenomena. We will use a couple of the simulations in the built-in libraries to illustrate some concepts in the course. Netlogo has been installed on CDF (command "netlogo") but can also be downloaded and installed on your own computer. Feel free to explore and play around.
- Gephi is an open-source platform for interactive visualization and exploration of networks and graphs of various types. It can handle fairly large graphs and is well-suited to the exploration of social networks.
- Connected: The Power of Six Degrees . A 2008 Australian documentary on networks and network science.
- Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. A popular book by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler that discusses the effect of networks, with a special emphasis on social influence, or "social contagion", in a variety of domains. A number of links, slides, and other resources.
- A A series of videos reviewing basic concepts of probability theory: For those of you who prefer video to text (and don't mind spending five times longer to browse through the same amount of material). Grinstead and Snell's tutorial above is more comprehensive.
- Eric Fischer's Race and Ethnicity 2010 Set. These are visualizations of racial/ethnic segregation across more than 100 US cities. The Schelling model at work?
- The Tragedy of the Commons: Lecture notes about the phenomenon using Hardin's original motivation. Here's a Youtube clip giving a qualitative description of the problem.