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Krebs selected political books from the *New York Times* bestseller list, searched for those books within Amazon and Barnes&Noble, and then recorded a co-purchasing relationship between the two books if they were connected by a 'customers who bought this book also bought...' link.

Usage

political_books_network

Format

Nodes: 105; unimodal Edges: 441; unweighted; undirected This dataset is from Melanie Walsh. Prepared for R by Benjamin Smith

Source

GitHub, <https://github.com/melaniewalsh/sample-social-network-datasets>

Details

For more on the methodology, see [Krebs's website](http://www.orgnet.com/divided2.html) or [the New York Times feature](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/books/study-finds-a-nation-of-polarized-readers.html) on his work.

Though this network is not technically, or perhaps not exclusively, a social one, the network reveals and suggets potential patterns about the communities of people buying these books. It also calls into question how forms of media consumption might influence, shape, reinforce, or reflect national political polarization.