Connected Action

Facebook recently announced its fellowship program for graduate students pursuing a PhD. Winners will receive tuition, fees, and a stipend for the 2010-2011 academic year. Anyone interested in applying should move quickly, as the deadlines are quite tight in order to ensure that we can provide funding for the upcoming year.
The fellowship is designed to [...]

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My colleagues on the Facebook Data Team recently posted the results of a study about the diversity of the Facebook user base.

Using surnames from users in the United States and comparing the rates at which those surnames occur in several ethnic populations, they were able to estimate the proportion of Facebook users within different populations [...]

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My colleague at the Oxford Internet Institute, Bernie Hogan, is working on tools that collect personal Facebook network data and visualize the connections among your friends.
Here is an example: http://twitpic.com/9rvfq

It provides a good illustration of the ways a person’s social network is clumped into clusters built around life phases, workplaces, educational institutions, teams and locations.  [...]

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[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]
9-10AM: A Tempest: Or, on the Flood of Interest in Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and the Computational Treatment of Subjective Language (Lillian Lee)
-Sentiment analysis using discussion structure: clasify speeches in US congressional floor debates as supporting or opposing proposed legislation -Individual doc classifier -agreement (degree) classifier for pairs of [...]

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My colleague Scott Sargent at Telligent notes that there are two sections of the March 29th Sunday New York Times feature articles illustrated with network graphs.  The Business section runs an article “Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?“ (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html) and the Style Section has an article on The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem.

My colleague Prof. Ben Shniederman [...]

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This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Unfortunately, the article did not include any of the data visualizations, so we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis in more detail.

For more details, [...]

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Here is a good example of an application of Bernie Hogan’s Facebook edgelist extractor. Alan Shussman used it on his own Facebook account and generated the following image:
Alan used the NetworkX tool and python to build this image of his sub-groups in Facebook.
It does work nicely to highlight the life-stage clusters of relationships that [...]

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