Introduction

When we think of the term social network, sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Meetup immediately come to mind. However, data analysts have applied the concepts of social network analysis in domains as varied as co-authorship networks, human networks, the spread of disease, migratory birds, and interlocking corporate board memberships, just to name a few. While working with graph and network visualizations, a good tool provides the data analyst with the capability to restructure the network in order to visualize the required parts of the graph in an enhanced way.

R provides various packages containing ready-to-use efficient layout algorithms to manipulate and analyze network data. In this chapter, we will cover recipes to make sense of real-world social network data (from Meetup and Twitter) with R.

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