R Network Package - node attributes - r

Question

I've recently started to learn R, with specific interest in network modeling applications. I've made a sample dataset and would like to visualize it, eventually getting to rigorous statistical network analysis.
The example is a high school friendship network. The node attributes are found in HS1_Node_Attributes.csv and the adjacency matrix is found in HS1_adjacency_matrix. I'm able to visualize the network, though I'm having trouble with node attributes (characteristics of the people). I'm using the network package.
The error I get is as follows:
Error in set.vertex.attribute(g, vertex.attrnames[[i]], vertex.attr[[i]]) :
Inappropriate value given in set.vertex.attribute.
I have cross-referenced my example with some tutorials online, along with the R Network package documentation. The potential problem could have been the type of my attribute data frame, though I confirmed it was type list, which checks out. So I'm not sure what the problem is. Everything works fine (meaning I can successfully create a network object) if I don't take out node attributes (the vertex.attr and the vertex.attrnames arguments), showing me that the rest of the code is sound. My code is below.
high_school1_attributes <- read.table("HS1_Node_Attributes.csv", header = TRUE,
sep = ",")
high_school1_adj <- read.table("HS1_adjacency_matrix.csv", header = TRUE,
row.names = 1, sep = ",")
adj1 <- as.matrix(high_school1_adj)
library("network")
high_school1_network <- network(adj1, vertex.attr = high_school1_attributes,
vertex.attrnames = colnames(high_school1_attributes),
directed = FALSE, hyper = FALSE, loops = FALSE,
multiple = FALSE, bipartite = FALSE)

Answer 1

You could be automatically converting strings to factors. I can recreate the error by doing:
high_school1_attributes <- read.csv(text=
"Name,Color
Kermit,green
Piggy,pink
Gonzo,blue")
high_school1_adj <- read.csv(text=
",From,To
1,1,3
2,3,2
3,2,1",
row.names = 1)
adj1 <- as.matrix(high_school1_adj)
library("network")
high_school1_network <- network(
adj1,
vertex.attr = high_school1_attributes,
vertex.attrnames = colnames(high_school1_attributes),
directed = FALSE, hyper = FALSE, loops = FALSE,
multiple = FALSE, bipartite = FALSE)
And can fix it by replacing the first statement with:
high_school1_attributes <- read.csv(text=
"Name,Color
Kermit,green
Piggy,pink
Gonzo,blue",
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
Which you can see works by plotting:
library(igraph)
library(intergraph)
hs_graph <- asIgraph(high_school1_network)
plot(hs_graph, vertex.size=8,
vertex.color=V(hs_graph)$Color,
vertex.label=V(hs_graph)$Name,
edge.arrow.size=0.25,layout=layout.fruchterman.reingold)