The Research Page of Carter Butts




Page Contents

Personal Information
Doctoral Students
Research Projects
Data Analysis Software
Links to Relevant Online Resources
Links to Relevant Journals
Departmental Links

Personal Information

I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. (I previously described myself as an "associated" professor, but I am not sure that anyone got the joke.) For those who are interested, an always mildly out of date copy of my vita is available here. (See also my faculty profile, which may or may not be slightly less out of date.)

Doctoral Students

I am currently supervising four Ph.D students in the Department of Sociology:
Ryan Acton
Zack Almquist
Lorien Jasny
Emma Spiro
Ph.D students I have graduated (yes, it does eventually happen!) so far include:
Christin Hilgeman
Miruna Petrescu-Prahova
Other doctoral students with which I have worked fairly extensively include Gabriel Lawson and Fabio Leite (of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences), Christine Bevc (Department of Sociology, University of Colorado), as well as Remy Cross, Chris Marcum, Kimberly Marx, Leah Reich and Ben Lind (Department of Sociology). Look for great deeds from all of these fine researchers in the years to come....

Research Projects

I am involved in a number of research projects involving social structure, measurement/comparison of graphs, behavior in emergency settings, the emergence of culture, and strategic decision-making. Several of these projects are described in more detail on my (now wildly out of date) research projects page. A better view of current goings-on may be had via my UCI faculty profile.

Data Analysis Software

I am the author of an assortment of programs for data analysis; my work in this regard deals primarily with relational data. The resulting software is freely available for other scientists to use, and much of it can be found online. Specific projects include:

The Statnet Project
This is a large collaborative project, centered on the generation of free software tools for the analysis of relational data; I am one of several members of the core development team.
My archive of R Routines for Network Analysis
This page contains information on R packages written and/or maintained by me, including the latest versions of sna and metamatrix. Although the focus of the routines is on network analysis, a few organizational and Bayesian data analytic tools are available as well.
The NetStat Library and Application Archive (Note: now defunct.)
This page contains information on NetStat, a library and archive of associated applications for the analysis of social and organizational structures. NetStat is implemented in ANSI C, and should be portable to a variety of platforms.

Links to Relevant Online Resources

The following online resources are particularly salient to my own research interests, and may be of use to others in the field:

Professional Organizations

The American Sociological Association
The ASA's section on Mathematical Sociology
The ASA's section on Methodology
The ASA's Section on Rationality and Society (previously known as the Section on Rational Choice)
The ASA's section on Social Psychology
The International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA)
Sigma Xi, the scientific research society
The Society for Mathematical Psychology
The American Association for the Advancement of Science

Online Projects and Archives

The Statnet Project
The R Project
The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)
My page of R Routines for Social Network Analysis
The Open Science Project
The StatLib statistics archive
IMBS technical reports
CASOS/ICES research reports
The Santa Fe Institute working paper series

Links to Relevant Journals

A wide variety of journals are relevant to work in my field; far too many for an exhaustive list to be practical. Nevertheless, the journals below are particularly useful, either as sources and outlets for formal social science research and/or for other useful theoretical and empirical developments. (Note: given my lack of time for updating things of late, these links may or may not be current. If you found this page, I trust you can use your favorite search engine to find the journal home page as well.)

American Journal of Sociology
American Sociological Review
Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory
Connections
Current Research in Social Psychology
Econometrica
Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
Journal of Classification
Journal of Games and Economic Behavior
Journal of Mathematical Sociology
Journal of Mathematical Psychology
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Journal of Social Structure
Random Structures and Algorithms
Social Forces
Social Networks
Social Psychology Quarterly
Sociological Methodology
Sociological Methods and Research
Theory and Decision
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society

Departmental Links

The following are links to various departments with which I am affiliated or otherwise have had regular dealings, in some way, shape, or form.

Currently Affiliated Units
The Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine
The Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UCI
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (and the NSF-funded RESCUE project)
Previously Affiliated Units
The Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University
CMU's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems
The Center for the Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at CMU
Duke University's Sociology Department
Other Departments of Interest (Possibly for Reasons Known Only to Me)
The H.J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at CMU
The CMU Statistics Department
The University of Washington's Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences

buttsc@uci.edu