This paper reviews and discusses two revolutions in the science of social networks: In the first revolution, new telecommunications and sensor technologies allow researchers to collect data on interaction events with unprecedented volume and granularity. In the second revolution, innovations in statistical methods are uniquely fit to make sense of these streaming data, by explicitly modeling temporal interdependence of relational events. This paper interrogates the mapping between conventional social network theories and these new forms of streaming interaction data, developing empirical frontiers for the analysis of interaction event histories.

Kitts, James A. and Eric Quintane. “Rethinking Social Networks in the Era of Computational Social Science.” In Light, Ryan and James Moody (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Social Network Analysis. pp 71-97. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.