Connected Action

When the late Peter Kollock and I published Communities in Cyberspace with Routledge in 1999 there were few broadband connections, no iPhones, and little WiFi.  Today, there is an ebook version of the book and Amazon sells a version for the Kindle, a device it was hard to even imagine when the book was written.  [...]

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The Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice (OD2005/DIAC-2005) was held at Stanford University May 20-22, 2005. From that event there is now a book,  Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice, edited by Todd Davies and Seeta Peña Gangadharan (CSLI Publications, November 2009).  All content in the book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share [...]

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On December 4th, I will be attending the Oxford Internet Institute’s Forum on Relationships and the Internet which will feature researchers focused on computer-mediated relationships.  Rather than being used primarily to access information, people often use networked computing to access people, creating or sustaining relationships with others.  There are many ways in which the Internet [...]

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Next week I will be attending and discussing mobile social media and social networks at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is my first time to Africa and I am excited to both visit and to discuss how mobile networked devices can change social organizations.  Mobile devices are in many ways more [...]

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The network created by “Who follows who among the people who tweeted “#CHI2010″. Node size is proportional to total tweets. Generated with NodeXL
On October 29th, I will be offering a workshop in Mountain View, California on the application of social network analysis to the measurement of social media.
The workshop will run from 9m to [...]

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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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This weekend is the Social Computing 2009 conference in Vancouver, B.C.  It is a gathering of many people doing research on social media useage.  Many papers are about tagging systems, blogs, wikis, message boards, and social networking services.
Along with several co-authors, I contributed to three papers in this year’s conference:
First Steps to Netviz Nirvana
Bonsignore, E.M., [...]

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The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11.
The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have  a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses.  The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association [...]

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The Catalyst Conference was July 27-31 in San Diego which gathered many people to discuss new technologies for enterprise computing.
On Wednesday, July 29 at 11:15 a.m. I gave a presentation about the use of social network analysis within the enterprise.

2009 – Social Media Analystics Research and ToolsView more presentations from Marc Smith.
Session Details: Social Network Analysis: A [...]

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A new book E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski on the ways social science research is being changed by the rise of social media has just been released by Routledge.  My colleagues and I contributed a chapter on the ways that information visualization of social media is a useful technique to [...]

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2009 – JCMC- Discussion Catalysts – Himelboim, Gleave and Smith

JCMC Article: Discussion Catalysts

My co-authors Eric Gleave, from the University of Washington, Department of Sociology and Itai Himelboim, from the University of Georgia, Department of Communications, are pleased to note the publication of our paper “Discussion catalysts in online political discussions: Content importers and conversation starters“ in [...]

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My colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel.
The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for the [...]

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A few weeks ago I attended a meeting at the University of Maryland in College Park of a working group proposing a new “National Initiative for Social Participation”.  The meeting brought together people from the major universities, research labs, and government funding agencies to think about an “Apollo Program for Social Media”.  The idea is [...]

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[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]
10.30am A categorical model for discovering latent structure in social annotations (Said Kashoob)
Given a collection of web objects, users and tags, can we model the underlying tag generation process?
-Discover implict communities of interest?
-Categories of related tags?
-For given category, id most relevant objs for category
-compare categories
Initial thoughts: content-based topic modeling [...]

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On Tuesday night Marc Smith and I will be presenting the poster for our paper, “Distinguishing Knowledge vs Social Capital in Social Media with Roles and Context” at the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media. You can find the poster, co-authored with Marc Smith (Telligent Systems), Lise Getoor (University of Maryland) and [...]

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