ODISSEI Lunch Lecture: Population Scale Social Network Analysis

Lecture by Eelke Heemskerk

POPNET is a novel digital infrastructure and research community with the aim of unlocking longitudinal social network data on the entire population of the Netherlands for academic research purposes. It enables new exciting research in an anonymized as well as ethically and legally responsible manner. This research may lead to actionable insights into key issues including segregation, substantive social change, and UN sustainable development goals such as reducing inequality.

Research infrastructure
A first-of-a-kind research infrastructure tailored in terms of hard- and software specifically for large-scale social network analysis will be developed. Rich methods from social network analysis and network science will be implemented to unveil new and previously unknown knowledge about the complexity of the Dutch population. This requires the development of an infrastructure that facilitates this kind of research in terms of computation power, memory and data management.

Social network analysis research
Pilot social network analysis studies will be performed on the (anonymized) population-scale social network of the Netherlands, consisting of 17 million nodes (people) and their hundreds of millions of family, work, school and neighbourhood links as well as demographic attributes. The research, which has a strong computational social science character, will be done in parallel with the building of the research infrastructure to ensure alignment of the developed platform and researcher needs.

About the ODISSEI Lunch Lecture Series

The ODISSEI Lunch Lectures highlight methodological issues and innovations in Social Science.