Presented at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL (February 2014)

In this presentation, we introduce the Rapid Ethnographic Network Analysis Tool (RENATO), a software package for the analysis of relational data such as found in social network analysis and cultural domain analysis. Historically, researchers have used a combination of packages, including Anthropac, a DOS-based cultural domain analysis program. Anthropac requires a DOS emulator to run under modern Windows operating systems, which can be problematic for many operational users. RENATO builds upon Anthropac’s capabilities, integrating network and cultural domain techniques with powerful visualization and database storage capabilities. Additionally, RENATO includes Android-based data collection components that support structured knowledge elicitation using a mobile device. For example, RENATO facilitates collecting a set of names (e.g., a list of gang members, a list of drug names) and enabling a respondent to use gestures to visually indicate relationships among them. The RENATO system uses a central data repository and desktop, thin-client, and mobile interfaces to provide a variety of functions, including: 1) a data collection designer for creating collection tasks such as freelisting, selecting from rosters, pilesorting, and paired comparisons, along with traditional survey methods; (2) a server for storing and sharing collection designs and the results of collections; (3) Android apps for executing the data collection on handheld devices and upload the results to a RENATO server; (4) a desktop client for performing detailed analysis such as multidimensional scaling, consensus analysis, clustering, and centrality measures; and (5) thin-client interfaces to browse data sets, perform lightweight analysis, and bundle subsets of the data for analysis.