Social networks analysis has received special attention over the past decade, and a lot of tools for manipulating and rendering social networks have emerged. In several situations a social network is associated with a spatial dimension, and behaviors observed within the network cannot be interpreted without taking into account the location of each of its nodes regarding to the other nodes. This is the case, for example, when studying inflows/outflows between cities or companies, or when studying people debating in a room. Based on the sp package, which provides efficient classes for storing spatial data and methods for handling and rendering them, the spnet package aims at facilitating the rendering of (social) networks on maps. Furthermore, fixing network node positions allows to more easily monitor time-varying networks and observe how connections and flows evolve over time.
In the future the package will be also designed to be used together with the Rsocialdata package for which tools for preparing network data are in development.

Authors: Emmanuel Rousseaux, Marion Deville and Gilbert Ritschard.

Availability:
• Official released available from the CRAN.
Installation: install.packages("spnet")
• Development version available from the spnet R-Forge repository.
Installation: install.packages("spnet", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org", type = "source")
Documentation:
• Package vignette: Overview of the spnet R package (web, pdf)
• Slides of the presentation at the Rencontres R 2014 conference
Development: The development version is hosted on the R-Forge platform.