  We provide an introduction to Dirichlet forms on discrete spaces and study
their global properties such as recurrence, stochastic completeness and
regularity of the Neumann form. In this setting we compare the notion of a
recurrent Dirichlet form and a recurrent discrete time Markov chain of a given
graph. We prove several known and several new characterizations of recurrence
by using functional analytic Dirichlet form methods only. Finally, we compare
all the mentioned global properties and discuss their relation to spectral
theory.
