I had dinner and a few wines with a good friend on Friday night. He is interested in network analysis and wanted to read some materiel that is grounded and relatively easy to understand. I'm also having dinner with a PhD student from ANU on Thursday night. I have no doubt the same topic will come up, although he will want something more substantial. Coincidentally Professor Barry Wellman and Professor Alexandra Marin , have just published "Social Network Analysis: An introduction ", which is a draft chapter for an upcoming book on social network analysis. It's very readable and a succinct introduction, and one that I would highly recommend to anyone.

Of course it's very hard to go past the resources available at INSNA , and particularly Connections , which is a peer-reviewed journal and the definitive source for reliable grounded work. A recent issue of Methodological Innovations presents some good quality articles on social network analysis. The articles on both sites can be downloaded for free.

Another very interesting site with a number of excellent papers is Learning for Sustainability . They have a whole section on building and mapping networks. I particularly recommend Skye Bender-deMoll's report on network analysis and mapping. The goal was to give a non-academic introduction to network concepts and related fields, survey some relevant academic and humanitarian projects, and make some proposals. He also maintains a very interesting blog - check out the entry on disease transmission and have a look at the network animation . Another paper well work reading on this site is "Strengthening humanitarian networks: Applying the network functions approach " by Ben Ramalingam, Enrique Mendizabal and Ed Schenkenberg van Mierop.

Anyway that should be enough to get you started and to whet your network analysis appetite. If you really want more I recommend INSNA or have a look at my bibliography , which can be downloaded as an Endnote database file, but of course includes lots of knowledge management stuff. Remember networks and sharing matter! I look forward to hearing about your recommendations.

Regards Graham