Marius Ion Bența, PhD

Thanks for stopping by. I'm a sociologist, journalist, and programmer from Cluj, Romania. I have a PhD in sociology from University College Cork, Ireland, and I work as a sociology researcher with the George Barițiu History Institute and journalism lecturer with the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj city.

My profile pages on: Academia.edu ResearchGate.net PhilPapers.com

I've always been passionate about too many things at once, from hard-science stuff, such as Social Network Analysis, programming and physics, to rather philosophical and discoursive areas, such as political anthropology, media, and, lately, Biblical theology.

The Story

I wrote AGNA in the Java programming language between 2001 and 2004 while doing my PhD research at University College Cork, even though it was not part of my doctoral programme. However, I began experimenting with social networks earlier, in 1993-94 as a student in Cluj, when our sociology professor Achim Mihu explained to us the basic notions of sociometry, which I immediately saw as a powerful methodology. As I was familiar with Turbo Pascal, I jumped into it, and began experimenting with network models. The app was initially called ANA, was making use of procedural programming and had a DOS-based interface and very simple graphical capabilities.

It must have been in 1998 when, together with Alina S. Rusu, we used AGNA to analyse networks extracted from behavioural sequences recorded in mice, et voilÃ, AGNA does some Sequence Analysis, too, to this day.

After Turbo Pascal, I discovered Delphi, so I built an initial version of AGNA that ran on Windows and was based on OOP. Then in the early 2000s I decided to rewrite the app from scratch in Java, given the write-once-run-anywhere promise of this language. I made use of Swing for the user interface and JNI technologies to increase computational performance.

Today

AGNA has been used by hundreds of social scientists in their research, as I can understand from the many papers that have cited it so far. They generally appreciated the user friendliness and gentle learning curve of the app. Difficulties and turmoils made things quite hectic, and I hardly found time and energy to work on it and produce new versions of the software. Hopefully, I'll be able to add new functionalities to it in the future, yet who knows how things are going to go.

I hesitated between making this app open source and keeping it closed source; eventually, AGNA remained closed source and free. I saw it as my humble gift to the scientific community, because I, too, have received so much from God and from people.

Thanks to everyone who's been using AGNA in all these years, and thanks for the precious feed-back, comments, and kind words.

I also thank Petruța, the first visitor of AGNA's new website netanalysis.co.uk on the day this website was launched, for her feed-back:

And many thanks to Alina S. Rusu for having guided Petruța's official visit here and having captured her candid moment, but also for having encouraged my work on AGNA and having inspired the Sequential Analysis component of this app's functionalities.

Phenomenological Sociology and Political Anthropology

While not directly connected to SNA, most of my research is theoretical and interpretive and revolves around phenomenological sociology, political anthropology, anthropology of religion and various topics related to the genealogy of the modern world, as my publications show it:

In the same line, check out these two interesting academic journals, which I'm lucky to work at: