The EGI will host a Conference and Workshop on Social Network Analysis
for students and early career researchers. The meeting will be held in
the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, from Wednesday 6th January – Friday 8th
January 2016. Registration is free to all participants. Unfortunately,
we will not be able to offer financial support to cover travel or
accommodation expenses. Booking or request for further details should be
sent to SNAworkshop@zoo.ox.ac.uk by Friday, 27th November.
The workshop will be limited to 15 participants; places will be filled
in accordance with the first-come first-served principle.
This meeting aims to provide PhD students in the
field of animal behavior with skills for understanding and applying SNA,
as well as to foster exchange and discussion among a small group of
early-career researchers. Depending on space availability, we might
consider applications by early post-doc researchers as well.
The meeting will consist of a half-day conference followed by a
two-day workshop on social network analysis (SNA). We are pleased to
announce that Dr. Lucy Aplin will open the conference with a talk about
her exciting work on social ecology of great tits and blue tits studied
in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. She has been studying social and
ecological processes structuring group composition, and recently used
social network analysis to investigate the spread of novel behaviours
and animal culture in tit populations. Lucy is a Junior Research Fellow
at St John’s College and member of the EGI. More information about her
current and recent work can be found on her personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/lucymaplin/home
Conference attendees will have the opportunity to present and discuss
their current projects, which may be in any state of completion. For
example, participants might prepare a poster to introduce their study
system, outline their proposed research questions, and discuss
possibilities for using SNA once they have collected data. We ask all
participants, who wish to present a poster, to prepare a very short
presentation of three minutes (maximum of three slides), which should be
designed to attract attention to the poster.
The 2-day workshop on January 7th-8th will be
led by Dr. Damien Farine, Research Associate at EGI and Principal
Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology Department of
Collective Behaviour. Day 1 will cover fundamental theory of network
analysis, and Day 2 will give attendees the chance to apply SNA software
tools and use R to analyse either their own data or to work through
provided examples. No previous experience with social network analysis
is required to attend this course. For more information on the workshop,
please visit Damien’s webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/drfarine/teaching/sna_workshop
The workshop will be based in the Department of Zoology at the
University of Oxford. We will also organise some evening social events
to give participants the opportunities to network both with each other
and with researchers at the EGI.