25 Facts About Barry Wellman

Barry Wellman was an American-Canadian sociologist and was the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network.

Barry Wellman has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books.

Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman were co-authors of the 2012 prize-winning Networked: The New Social Operating System.

Barry Wellman is the editor of three books, and the author of more than 500 articles, often written with students.

Barry Wellman received career achievement awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, the International Communication Association, the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence, and two sections of the American Sociological Association: Community and Urban Sociology; Communication and Information Technologies.

Barry Wellman was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2007.

In 2012, Barry Wellman was identified as having the highest h-index of all Canadian sociologists.

Barry Wellman was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013.

Barry Wellman died after a long illness on 9 July 2024, at the age of 81.

Barry Wellman was born and raised in the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road area of the Bronx, New York City.

Barry Wellman gained his high school degree from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959.

Barry Wellman's focus was on community, computer applications, social networks and self-conception, and his dissertation showed that the social identities of African-American and White American Pittsburgh junior high school students were related to the extent of segregation of their schools.

Barry Wellman was married since 1965 to Beverly Wellman, a researcher in complementary and alternative medicine.

Barry Wellman has edited Networks in the Global Village, a book of original articles about personal networks around the world.

Concomitant with his empirical work, Barry Wellman contributed to the theory of social network analysis.

Barry Wellman often worked in collaboration with computer scientists, communication scientists and information scientists.

Barry Wellman did empirical work in this area: he was part of a team that surveyed visitors to the National Geographic Society's website in 1998 and used these data to counter the dystopian argument that Internet involvement was associated with social isolation.

Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman studied the Toronto suburb of "Netville", a pseudonym.

Barry Wellman collaborated with Helen Hua Wang and Jeffrey Cole of the World Internet Project's Center for the Digital Future to investigate the first national US survey of social relationships and Internet use.

Barry Wellman collaborated with Ben Veenhof, Carsten Quell and Bernie Hogan to relate time spent at home on the Internet to social relations and civic involvement.

Barry Wellman's work continued to focus on the interplay between information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, social relations and social structure.

Barry Wellman directed the Connected Lives study of the interplay between communication, community and domestic relationships in Toronto and in Chapleau in rural northern Ontario.

Barry Wellman was involved in the "Networked Individuals" project, using the fourth East York study to investigate their social networks and digital media use.

Barry Wellman's collaborators include Brent Berry, Molly-Gloria Harper, Maria Kiceveski, Guang Ying Mo, Anabel Quan-Haase, Helen Hua Wang, and Alice Renwen Zhang.

Barry Wellman was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.