Social network analysis is the application of network theory to the modeling and analysis of social systems. It combines both tools for analyzing social relations and theory for explaining the structures that emerge from distributed social interactions. With the rise in computation and the emergence of a mass of new data sources, social network analysis is now one of the major paradigms in contemporary sociology, and is also employed in many other social sciences, it offers us a powerful formal language with which to model and analyze the structure of social relations and how this structure defines the overall social system.
