Summary

We covered a lot of material in this short chapter. We discussed the confusion around the word network, went into the history and origins of graph theory, social network analysis, and network science, discussed resources for learning and practice, discussed some of my favorite network use cases, and finished by explaining how you can start formulating your own network research.

I hope this chapter gave you a rough idea of what all of this network stuff is. I know I did not go into great detail on the origins, and I mostly talked about social network analysis, but that is because that is my area of interest. I hope you now understand what networks can be used for, and I hope you understand that I have only scratched the surface. My goal was to ignite your curiosity.

In the next chapter, I will explain the tools used for NLP. We are going to gradually move past theory and into data science.