There are many people who have contributed to our understanding of social networks and the culmination of this text. For those interested, we present our journey of learning, while acknowledging those who made it possible.
In 2005, while conducting research in response surface optimization for the Army, I heard John Parmentola state, “Network Science is the Army's number four research priority.” As I began to learn more about this exciting field, I discovered several presentations from Steve Borgatti posted online. Steve is an amazing teacher and has the ability to present the most complex material in a very simple way. He was very open and collaborative with me and allowed me to use his posted materials when I taught my first social network analysis course at West Point in 2005.
Two students emerged out of my initial entry into social network analysis, Julie Paynter and Victor Basher. Had it not been for these two students, I probably would not have continued into the discipline. Julie was ranked number three in the class of 2006 at West Point. She was going to be a military intelligence officer and was majoring in mathematics. She had done an internship the summer before studying influence in jihadist texts. Her senior thesis applied social network analysis to understand influence in jihadist authors in Iraq. Vic Basher had been an intelligence analyst with the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Iraq and subsequently went to West Point. He was in my basic probability and statistics course, having difficulty understanding why an Army officer needed to learn math and physics. He was independently downloading insurgent propaganda videos on his personal computer to look for forensic clues that could help his friends who were at the time deployed to Iraq. In an effort to motivate his study of mathematics, I suggested an application of social network analysis to his data. As of April 1, 2006, Vic had downloaded 74% of all US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and had cross-referenced them with hometown news reports. The network we made allowed us to identify clusters (using one of Steve Borgatti's posted lectures) that helped us identify insurgent groups. Vic, Julie, and I presented our research at a variety of military audiences to include the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), the newly formed Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG), and Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
During my tour of military agencies, I met Kathleen Carley. She told me that she was interested in collaborating with me. My brash response was that I “needed to get a Ph.D. out of the deal.” She put up with my arrogance. She taught me more than any professor or teacher I have ever known. She is one of the most brilliant academics I have ever met. Her contributions to the field of social network analysis are so advanced; many have difficulty believing they aren't science fiction. Few will ever know how many lives she saved through her contributions to the US Military's Global War on Terror. She showed the military how to target threats correctly, collect evidence, and prevent innocents from being erroneously targeted. I am very proud that she was willing to serve as myadvisor.
Around the same time, I received my first large research grant in the area of social networks. Joe Psotka and Dan Horn at the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences awarded me a grant to study and compare email networks with face-to-face friendship networks. In addition, they provided seed money to establish West Point's Network Science Center. As we stood up this center, my good friends Tony Johnson and Helen Armstrong took our efforts to a new level, expanding our research directions, organizing conferences, winning grants, and most importantly, teaching. Through our early conferences we met Nosh Contractor, László Barabási, and Guido Calderelli. Each of these individuals showed us different and novel applications of network analysis in social media, biology, physics, and fractals. They showed us how to reach out across our academic institution and create truly interdisciplinary and collaborative research.
Another student challenged my world-view of academia, Josh Lospinoso. I was the Mathematics Department academic advisor. Josh had recently majored in Operations Research and Tony and I couldn't understand why he had no interest in physics or engineering. He told us, “Those were easy problems that anyone could solve.” He was interested in the much more challenging and complex issues of human and social behavior; but not from a qualitative perspective. He wanted to model it mathematically. Josh joined Tony, Helen, and I as we learned about social networks together. Josh interned every summer at the NSA, applying social networks to defense applications as a cadet. Some argue that the success in Iraq in 2006–2007 had less to do with the surge of forces and more to do with the successful targeting of threats. Josh's work contributed to that effort.
We learned that Josh was not alone in his view that social science provided a challenging application area for mathematics. We discovered mathematical sociology and anthropology. Through the Sunbelt conferences we were able to meet Russ Bernard, Dimitrios Christopolous, Jeff Johnson, David Krackhardt, and many others who encouraged us in our research and motivated us to bring social network analysis to the undergraduate student populations we had at West Point. Tom Valente, in particular, had many conversations with us about teaching social network analysis. He not only shared his materials freely but helped us shape the way we present material and the content of our courses. He has even organized sessions at Sunbelt for professors to discuss the pedagogy of social network analysis.
Through the support and collaboration of all of these individuals, our program at West Point grew from Julie and Vic to seven undergraduate students presenting research at the 2007 Sunbelt conference in Corfu, Greece, to 23 students at the 2011 Sunbelt conference in Tampa, Florida. There are now well over a dozen faculty and 100 undergraduate students studying social network analysis at West Point. Helen established the Centre for Organizational Analysis in the School of Information Systems at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia, which expands this effort and it continues to grow. Ian and Tony have worked to expand an understanding of social network analysisthroughout the US Military to include teaching 16 courses in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are grateful to the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA) as an academic community, for being so receptive to us and enabling us to develop this text and encourage us in our academic endeavors.
I. A. M.