SOCPROG and the analysis of animal social structure using individual identifications
A half-day afternoon workshop to be held on the 15th of August 2006 at the
International Ethological Conference in Halifax
 
SOCPROG is a series of MATLAB programs written by Hal Whitehead for analyzing data on the social structure, population structure and movements of identified individuals. The programs are designed to be easy to use, most input is done through graphical user interfaces (i.e. windows with things to click on), and most things can be done without any knowledge of MATLAB (although this helps for custom options, figuring out errors, making your own extensions, etc.). There is also a compiled version of SOCPROG, so you don’t need access to MATLAB (although you have more options if you do). The programs are also designed to be pretty flexible so you can tailor the analyses to your data and hypotheses. The program is free and can be downloaded from: http://myweb.dal.ca/~hwhitehe/social.htm. There is also more information about SOCPROG at this site, including the manual.
The computer program SOCPROG is used by marine mammalogists, and others, to examine social structure, usually using data from photo-identifications. However, analyzing social structure and using SOCPROG are not straightforward. The SOCPROG workshop plans to provide guidance in these matters, using onscreen real-time analyses of real data. Participants do not need to have experience in using SOCPROG (although this will help).
 
Possible workshop issues:
 
  1. •What is Social Structure?
  2. •Observing Interactions and Associations: Collecting Data
  3. •Organizing Data
  4. •Describing Relationships: Methods Available
  5. •Building Models of Social Structure: Methods Available
  6. •Comparing Social Structures: How Can we do this?
  7. •SOCPROG: what it does
  8. •SOCPROG: how to get and install it
  9. •SOCPROG: inputting data
  10. •SOCPROG: restricting data; setting sampling associations and sampling periods
  11. •SOCPROG: displays of associations
 
Network analyses:
 
  1. •SOCPROG: tests of social hypotheses
  2. •SOCPROG: temporal changes in social structure
  3. •SOCPROG: multivariate methods, and incorporation of genetic data
  4. •SOCPROG: movement and population analyses
 
 
Chair: Hal Whitehead
Organizer: Tonya Wimmer
 
PDF of the workshop announcement
 
If you are registering ONLY for the SOCPROG workshop given by Hal Whitehead you will follow these steps.  A popup with these instructions is available on the registration website.
 
  1. ‣Create a user name and password.
  2. ‣The first page is personal/contact information.  In the window for "POSITION" (i.e., Professor, Student, Post-doc) please select "Hal Whitehead Workshop".
  3. ‣Continue filling in details, saving each page as you go. You may choose to attend Evening Receptions and/or Day-Off Excursions at an additional cost.
  4. ‣Confirm your payment details and pay.
 
Go here to start registering now