Interest in social networks goes back many decades.

Indeed, among researchers

studying networks sociologists have perhaps the longest and best established
tradition of quantitative, empirical work. There are clear antecedents of social
network analysis to be found in the literature as far back as the end of the
nineteenth century, though the true foundation of the field is usually attributed
to psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, a Romanian immigrant to America who in the
1930s became interested in the dynamics of social interactions within groups of
people. At a medical conference in New York City in March 1933 he presented
the results of a set of investigations he had performed that may have been the
first true social network studies, and the work attracted enough attention to
merit a column in the New York Times a few days later. The following year
Moreno published a book entitled Who Shall Survive? [341] which, though
not a rigorous work by modern standards, contained the seeds of the field of
sociometry, which later became social network analysis.
The most startling feature of Moreno’s work was a set of hand-drawn figures
depicting patterns of interaction among various groups of people. He called
these figures sociograms rather than social networks (a term not coined until
about twenty years later), but in everything but name they are clearly what
we now know as networks. Figure 4.1, for instance, shows a diagram from
Moreno’s book, depicting friendships among a group of schoolchildren. The
triangles and circles represent boys and girls respectively, and the figure
reveals,
among other things, that there are many friendships among the boys and many
among the girls, but only one between a boy and a girl. It is simple conclusions
like this, that are both sociologically interesting and easy to see once one draws
a
picture, that rapidly persuaded social scientists that there was merit in Moreno’s
methods.