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The social and the cultural orders are dual – that is, they constitute each other. To understand either we need to account for both. Socio-semantic network analysis brings together the study of relations among actors (social networks), relations among elements of actors’ cultural structures (their semantic networks), and relations among these two orders of networks. In this introductory essay, we describe how the duality of the social and semantic networks that constitute each other, as well as other related dualities (including material / symbolic, micro / macro, computational / qualitative, in-presence contexts / online contexts, ‘Big’ data / ‘thick’ data), have evolved in recent decades to mold socio-semantic network analysis into its present form. In doing so, we delineate the current state of the art and the main features of socio-semantic network analysis as highlighted by the papers included in this Special Issue. These …