Two days of hands-on social network analysis, taught entirely on paper – no software, no coding, no maths beyond counting. Sixteen Florentine families, fourteen Indian Ocean ports, and a small social world each group maps itself.
Participants learn to produce a picture before they can say what the picture asserts, and the picture is persuasive out of all proportion to the evidence behind it. This camp inverts that.
For two days, nobody touches a network package. Every quantity is counted by hand on networks small enough to hold in view. The analytic work is the rigorous argument about what should count as a node and what should count as a tie.
The bootcamp is convened by Dr Rakesh Sengupta with support from Judith Grace Lazarus
| Open to: Undergraduates and interested faculty across SIAS. Prerequisites: None. No prior exposure to network analysis, no graph theory, and no programming is required. No mathematics beyond counting is needed. |
| You do not need any of this : No laptop. There is no software in this camp at all. Nothing to install, nothing to download. No coding. None. Not on either day. No maths beyond counting. If you can count ticks in a row, you can do every calculation in the two days. No reading beforehand. The reading list comes afterwards, and it is optional. No prior anything. We assume you have never heard the word “node”. |
Since this is a hands-on bootcamp, only 35 spots are available. Registrations close on Friday, 23 October 2026.
