A Lecture by Jānis Daugavietis on Social Media

On December 6, 2023, at 11:30 a.m., at the Latvian Folklore Archives on the 5th floor of the National Library of Latvia, Jānis Daugavietis—a sociologist and researcher at the Department of Art Studies of the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (UL ILFA)—will present an overview of the concept of the “social network” as used in the social sciences and humanities, along with the theories associated with it.

The aim of the open public lecture is to provide insight into the theoretical issues surrounding social networks, while its objective is to stimulate discussion on how network theory might be applied to the analysis of Latvia’s folklore movement (which emerged under a non-democratic regime in the Soviet Union in the 1970s).

Topics of the lecture and subsequent discussion include:

• the genealogy of the concept “social network” and its place within a thesaurus of related concepts that describe and conceptualize social communities;

• key social network theories and approaches, including authors who apply this concept in music analysis;

• the main empirical approaches and practices in social network research;

• social network theories and methods that could potentially be applied in research on the Latvian folklore movement.

The lecture and discussion are held within the framework of the FLPP project “The Folklore Movement in Latvia: Resources, Ideologies, and Practices” (lzp-2021/1-0243), which focuses on studying the history of the folklore movement that emerged in Latvia in the 1970s.

Image: A fragment of an ethnomusicology community network visualization from grupusaites.lv.