PGraph

Doug White's PGRAPH (c) 1997 research programs for kinship network analysis. The  pgraph is a concept for a novel representation of such networks where the vertices are not individuals but intersections between individuals (as in marriage) or between groups and individuals, where graph-theoretic cycles and blocks are relevant units of analysis. ASCII files in various formats may be converted by the EGO2CPL program to  Gedcom format and Pajek (SNA program) formats.

White states that Pajek is preferred now for analysis but these pages have a great deal of useful information on kinship analysis.

The Pgraph site contains a link to the new Tools for Marriage Network Analysis site that contains a new approach compatible with Pajek that allows virtually unlimited data to be entered into an excel spreadsheet and run through a preprocessor that makes a network file for Pajek. The macros that are then provided for Pajek, version 1.01, and that can be downloaded at that site, will do a whole series of structural analyses in the form of marriage-type censuses and display of the network of aactual marriages plus how links to the types of marriage that they represent. The Tools site contains links to publications explaining and using these new methods.

Some researchers will also favor the new data formats and kinship networks contructed with them because they retain individuals as the nodes of the network and find all the types of marriages, using standard symbols for males and females, and differentiating different types of half as well as full siblingship. The original p-graph networks, in contrast, have marriages as the nodes and allow easy recognition of structural endogamy that defines the cohesive units of the kinship network which show of as bicomponents, in which every pair of marriages are connected by two or more kinship paths. The latter approach is fully treated in White and Johansens 2006 paperback, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan.

From:  Doug White

Platform: DOS - Windows version in Beta

Cost: Free

See: http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pgraph/p-graphs.html

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