Investigating the Hotspot and Evolution Path in the Field of Art Design: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Abstract

With the purpose of finding out the development trend of Chinese art design discipline, a key network in the field of art design was constructed using social network analysis method to perform an in-depth investigation of the evolution path of China’s research hotspots in art design. This paper employs the Netdraw and the Bicomb software to extract high-frequency key themes and to draw the key themes co-occurrence social network in the field of art design, respectively. The key themes in the field of art design were classified and summarized into three stages from 2003 to 2007, 2008 to 2010 and from 2011 to 2016. The results showed a diversified research direction of China’s art design, and many fields such as traditional art, environmental art, and information art design were beginning to receive great attention. However, teaching and innovation have been the focus of attention in the field of art design. In addition, the correlation between research directions in the field of Chinese art design is gradually increasing and the key network shows a special small-world effect. But, there was yet to be any significant alliance among the research topics.

Keywords: Art design; Social network analysis; Research hotspot; Evolution path