Digital technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives and are inextricably linked with political and processes. Occupy Wallstreet would not have existed without online communication and social network sites such as Facebook play an important role in election campaigns. In the context of an emerging “hybrid media system”, examining and understanding the structures and dynamics of online communication is becoming a central task for researchers. The seminar provides an introduction to social network analysis, which is rapidly becoming one of the most important methods in the analysis of digital communication. Focussing on hands-on experience, this course will cover the basic analytical concepts and we will learn how to apply them to a dataset that was gathered in a project at the University of Bern. We will use the open source software platform R for the analysis, and the course starts with a general introduction to the logic and functionality of R.