Pajek installation

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Revision as of 13:18, 8 July 2011 by Michaelf (talk | contribs) (Using Pajak)
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Pajek is powerful, free social network analysis software. It runs natively on Windows, and via Wine on Mac or Linux.

Users should consult the Pajek wiki, as well as the older (but not entirely obsolete) website.

Installing Pajek

To download and install Pajek, follow instructions on the Pajek wiki. For compatibility with the book, download the ESNA Book Edition version (October 1, 2004), named "Pajek.be.exe". You may like to download the latest version as well, but without the older Book Edition there is no guarantee that everything will work as the book says it should.

Special instructions for the Mac: Installation on a Mac requires that you first download and install WineBottler. Ensure that you have X11 (supplied by Apple) installed as well. Download Pajek.exe and open it with Wine. You will then be asked whether you wish to run using Wine, or to create a standalone application using WineBottler.

UsingWine.jpg

I suggest you select the latter option, which will create a standalone Pajek application for your Mac.

Pajek Documentation and tutorials

Full manual

Useful tutorial

Using Pajek

Pajek reads and saves data in special files with extensions such as "net", "clu", "vec", and "paj".

For Windows, follow instructions in the Pajek User Manual. Create .net files using a simple text editor, such as Wordpad, that saves text only. You may need to change the file extension (and note that Windows tries to hide this file extensions, so you may have to customize your environment to see them) from "txt" to "net", "clu", "vec", or "paj", as needed. Other text editors may also be able to create readable Pajek files - try and see what works.

For Mac, follow these instructions, plus the following:

  • Create a folder on your Desktop called "AAA Pajek Data", with as many subfolders as you like. You can create an alias to this folder and keep it anywhere else, but having this folder on the Desktop will save time, because the Mac version of Pajek requires that you navigate from the top level of your directory hierarchy.
  • I suggest that you create your Pajek files using Word. Be sure to turn off "Smart Quotes" (so that quotation marks appear "straight"); in MS Word 2008 for Mac this option appears under menus Tools/AutoCorrect/AutoFormat as You Type (other versions may place it elsewhere). Be sure to enter a carriage return ("return") after every line, and leave no blank lines. Save your files using output format “Text only with line breaks”. This will force the file into the required plaintext PC format (where line breaks contain both a carriage return and a newline, unlike unix which uses newline only). Word wants to add the ".txt" extension to such files - delete that and replace with the required file extension instead. Other text editors may also be able to create readable Pajek files - try and see what works.

Pajek data sets

You should download these sample data sets for use with the textbook. Store them in your Pajek Data directory for future reference.