In collaboration with Optimice, I will teach a workshop on Social Network Analysis for enterprises, organizations, and businesses using NodeXL.

• Self-paced e-learning (4 hours)
  • Introduction to Social/Organisational Network Analysis
  • Network patterns and metrics
  • Software tools for network analysis
  • Managing an ONA Project
    
• Module 1: Scoping your ONA Project (2 hour virtual session hosted by Patti Anklam)
  • Determining which business problem to solve with ONA
  • Review of case-studies
  • Determining your questions
• Module 2: Setting up your ONA survey (2 hour virtual session hosted by Cai Kjaer / Laurence Lock Lee)
  • Setting up your survey
  • Working with mailing lists and other lists
  • Creating relationship sets and network questions
  • Previewing and launching the survey
  • Tracking progress and downloading responses
• Module 3: Visualise networks with NodeXL (2 hour virtual session hosted by Marc Smith)
  • Getting started with NodeXL
  • Calculating and visualizing network metrics
  • Preparing data and filtering
  • Importing data from Social Media tools
  • Clustering and grouping

A number of ONA Practitioner Courses are available to suit the timezones of participants located in the US, Europe and/or Asia-Pacific (but not restricted to these regions):

I will present a talk at Personal Digital Archiving 2012 titled “Arc-chiving: saving social links for study“.

The conference will be held on Thursday-Friday, February 23-24, 2012 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

News and updates on the conference will be posted at the conference web site, http://personalarchiving.com.

My talk this year will focus on collecting and analyzing connections between digital objects (like users) and the insights these tools make possible.

Abstract: While digital content is archived in various ways, the “arcs” or links among people and their digital objects are not systematically saved. Efforts to store social media often overlooks including data about collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship related to social media. It is producing tools that can collect, analyze and upload social media data, including the arcs that link people and objects. Using the free and open NodeXL application, users can collect, analyze and visualize complex networks and then upload the data to a growing archive on the web at NodeXLGraphGallery.org. As the group of researchers grows, an archive is being assembled to provide researchers around the world with the data about social media needed to understand the ways computer mediated communication tools shape society.

My talk at the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving conference is available through the Internet Archive’s video service:

This map of connections among people who tweeted Teaparty starts on 11/15/2011 14:22 UTC and ends on 11/15/2011 17:23, a total of 3 hours and 1 minute of traffic.

The Teaparty data set contained 1,533 tweets, replies and mentions.
Blue edges are connections created by replies and mentions. Grey lines are follows relationships.

Top most between users:
@ronpaul
@michellemalkin
@christopherhull
@theteaparty_net
@capaction
@thedailyedge
@bill1phd
@dbargen
@gulagbound
@rightcandidates

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 659
Unique Edges: 8808
Edges With Duplicates: 1423
Total Edges: 10231
Self-Loops: 1084
Connected Components: 49
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 44
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 606
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 10148
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 6
Average Geodesic Distance:2.693965
Graph Density: 0.02036797
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.193

The major clusters are composed of teaparty supporters. The center bottom cluster are teaparty critics.

This map of the connections among people who tweeted Occupywallstreet starts on 11/15/2011 23:08 and ends on 11/15/2011 23:34 UTC, a total of 26 minutes of traffic.

Occupywallstreet 1,370 tweets, replies and mentions
Blue edges are connections created by replies and mentions. Grey lines are follows relationships.

Top most between users:
@occupywallst
@mmflint
@nyclu
@allisonkilkenny
@andrewbreitbart
@operationleaks
@occupydenver
@theatlantic
@usgeneralstrike
@rt_com

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 3546
Edges With Duplicates: 826
Total Edges: 4372
Self-Loops: 794
Connected Components: 241
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 230
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 747
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 3998
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 7
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.65438
Graph Density: 0.003246246
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.194

Some notable contrasts:
Teaparty Graph Density: 0.002652645
Occupywallstreet Graph Density: 0.02036797 – significantly lower levels of interconnection
Teaparty: Single-Vertex Connected Components 44 of 1000
Occupywallstreet: Single-Vertex Connected Components 283 of 1000

Many more “isolates” (Single-Vertex Connected Components) in Occupywallstreet.
Many more hubs, and more retweeting activity in Occupywallstreet.

The difference in duration of these data sets illustrates the relative speed of content creation in the topics. The data sets are commensurable in that they are both the result of a single query against the Twitter search API. So both maps are the results of charting connections among the authors of the last 1500 tweets, how ever long that takes to create.

Threaded conversations are a major form of social media.  Message boards, email and email lists, twitter, blog comments, text messages, and discussion forums are all social media systems built around the message thread data structure.  As messages are exchanged through these systems, some messages are sent as a reply to a particular previous message.  As messages are sent in reply to prior messages, chains of messages form.  Message chains come in two major forms: branching and non-branching.  Branching threads are those that allow more than one message to reply to a prior message.  Non-branching threads are single chains, like a string of pearls, that allow only one message to reply to a prior message.  Many web based message boards are non-branching.  Many email systems and discussion forums are branching.

ThreadMill requires a minimal set of data elements to generate its reports.  A data table must minimally have a column of information for each message that includes the name of the message board, the forum, the thread, and the author, along with a unique identifier for each message and the date and time it was posted.  Optional data elements include the unique identifier of the message being replied to, the URL of the message, and the URL for a profile photo.

All forms of threaded message exchange can be measured.  Simple measures like the count of the number of messages or the number of authors are obvious and useful.  Other measures can be created from more sophisticated analysis.  For example, the network of connections that forms as different authors reply to one another can be extracted and analyzed using network analysis methods.  It is possible to calculate metrics from these networks of reply that describe the location of each person in the graph.

ThreadMill generates several data sets that can be used to create visualizations of the activity and structure of a message board collection.

A Treemap data set can illustrate the hierarchy of encapsulated authors within threads, threads within fora, fora within boards, and boards within collections.  Treemap visualizations of collections of threaded conversations can quickly highlight the most active or populous discussions.

An AuthorLine visualization takes the form of a double histogram, with bubbles representing each thread active in each time period sized by the volume of messages the author contributed, sorted by size.  Threads that have been initiated by the author are represented as bubbles above the center line.  Messages that the author contributes to threads started by other authors are represented as bubbles stacked below the center line.  AuthorLines quickly reveal the pattern of activity an author displays and identifies which of several types of contributors the author is.

A scatter plot visualization represents each author as a bubble in an X-Y space defined by the number of different days the author was active against the average number of messages the author contributes to the threads in which they participate.

A time series line chart reveals the days of maximum and minimum activity along with trends.

A network diagram reveals the overall structure of the discussion space and the people who occupy strategic locations within the network graph.

ThreadMill has received generous assistance from Morningside Analytics.  Bruce Woodson implemented ThreadMill.

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word #JW11 when queried on October 10, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: www.jivesoftware.com/jiveworld

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6234653454/sizes/l/in/ph…

Top most between users:
@jivesoftware
@gialyons
@mikefraietta
@cflanagan
@cosmopolitan_lv
@ginorossi
@kristinhersant
@thebrandbuilder
@alanlepo
@mor_trisha

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 345
Unique Edges: 3606
Edges With Duplicates: 2072
Total Edges: 5678
Self-Loops: 632
Connected Components: 11
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 9
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 334
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 5659
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 5
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.353001
Graph Density: 0.034184361
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

http://ir12.aoir.org/

These are the  connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word AOIR when queried on October 10, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: ir12.aoir.org/

Top most between users:
@ir12
@barrywellman
@mikemonello
@netcrit
@andresmh
@s_t_e_v_e_jones
@zizip
@kellybergstrom
@katypearce
@guillaumelatzko

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 98
Unique Edges: 119
Edges With Duplicates: 672
Total Edges: 791
Self-Loops: 153
Connected Components: 40
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 35
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 55
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 710
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 6
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.257477
Graph Density: 0.035766884
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

By expanding the query to include #IR12, the conference hashtag, the network expands to include:

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word AOIR OR #IR12 when queried on October 11, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

Top most between users:
@ir12
@barrywellman
@mikemonello
@netcrit
@andresmh
@s_t_e_v_e_jones
@zizip
@kellybergstrom
@katypearce
@guillaumelatzko

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 231
Unique Edges: 1984
Edges With Duplicates: 2118
Total Edges: 4102
Self-Loops: 586
Connected Components: 46
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 40
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 181
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4012
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 5
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.213887
Graph Density: 0.046320346
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

Link: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6225446144/

Each user is scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: occupywallst.org/

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6225446144/sizes/l/in/ph…

Top most between users:
@maddow
@motherjones
@aclu
@zerohedge
@mmfa
@spread4freedom
@diggrbiii
@angelsavant
@marychastain
@katiepavlich

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 3835
Edges With Duplicates: 916
Total Edges: 4751
Self-Loops: 1109
Connected Components: 311
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 301
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 678
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4327
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 9
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.283708
Graph Density: 0.003408408
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

Orange is a major European telecommunications provider that has been focused on what they call the “porous enterprise” – organizations in which many of the previous boundaries and barriers between businesses and customers are gone.  Social media flows in and out of companies and mixes with public collections of discussions about them. Locked down corporate laptops now are joined by employee owned mobile devices.  Consumer social media products now mingle with enterprise social media.  Corporations now engage directly with customers through public consumer social media services.

For example, Orange has several Twitter accounts.  @Orange provides general product information while @Oranger_Conseil and @OrangeHelpers provide customer support for French and English speaking customers, and @orangeapi offers technical information for developers building applications against services offered by Orange.  There are several other related accounts.

The @Orange account has 2,039 followers and is following 621.  It has 673 tweets.  The pattern of connections among these people emerges into a network that can be clustered into sub-groups:


These are the connections among the Twitter users who follow or are followed by Orange when queried on September 30, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users follow one another.

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6209515710/sizes/l/in/ph…

Top most between users:
@orange
@orangebusiness
@twitter
@ygourven
@pressecitron
@frenchweb
@lionelfumado
@sosh_fr
@lemondefr
@mashable

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1587
Unique Edges: 18724
Edges With Duplicates: 26647
Total Edges: 45371
Self-Loops: 0
Connected Components: 229
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 227
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 1358
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 45367
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 7
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.625415
Graph Density: 0.012709666
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

The dense follows/follower map is a network that represents potential communication, the links indicate that there is a “follows” relationship between any two people.  The network of activated connections created when people reply or mention one another is more sparse.  For example, the @Oranger_Conseil and @OrangeHelpers accounts get mentioned by a number of other users who interact with them.  The connections among these people creates a network pattern:

This is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Orange conseil OR OrangeHelpers when queried on September 30, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

It is characterized by a hub and spoke pattern created as customers who have few connections to one another are linked to one of the hub customer service accounts for English and French speakers.

Top most between users:
@orangehelpers
@orange_conseil
@orange
@thomaslegac
@conorfromorange
@orangeripoff
@presseorange
@orangecomplaint
@lisepressac
@poupimali

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 372
Unique Edges: 474
Edges With Duplicates: 3308
Total Edges: 3782
Self-Loops: 73
Connected Components: 2
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 1
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 371
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 3781
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 4
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.356011
Graph Density: 0.008361592
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

Mentions of these accounts are good indications that the topic is the Orange Telecom company and not the many other Orange entities (like Orange County, the fruit, and the color, among others).  Searching for the term “Orange” or even “#Orange will likely bring back a large amount of these “name-space collisions” – overlapping uses of the term “Orange”.

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word #Orange when queried on October 3, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

This network of connections among the population of people who tweeted the term “#Orange has many “isolates” – users who do not follow, reply or mention any other person in the network.  These people all tweeted “#Orange” but they lack any connection to anyone else who did so.

The large cluster of connected users is a group of people discussing the Orange Telecom company, while the other clusters involve people discussing the colors of Autumn (Pumpkins!).

Top most between users:
@bluetouff
@laouffir
@fbrahimi
@presseorange
@damiendouani
@gregfromparis
@eogez
@thomaslegac
@isabellespanu
@challenges

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 2282
Edges With Duplicates: 960
Total Edges: 3242
Self-Loops: 1170
Connected Components: 584
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 515
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 155
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 1123
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 8
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.787863
Graph Density: 0.001827828
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

I have enjoyed and been educated by my previous visits to South Africa and the Mobile Web in Africa conference, now in its 3rd year.

MWA gathers the many parts of the picture of mobile technologies in play across the African continent.

I will speak again at this year’s event, focusing on social media networks.  My partner is Walter Pike, a marketing professional with a specialty in digital media.

Here is the agenda for the workshop on Friday, November 25th.

Photos from the prior two years of Mobile Web Africa after the jump:

2010

2009

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

Eventful.  The 2011 Webshop at the University of Maryland was certainly that with both an earthquake and a hurricane to mark the start and end of the event.  We really moved heaven and earth at this workshop.

In 4  days, 20 talks, 45 students, an earthquake, a hurricane and many new connections – the Webshop touched on a set of related concepts, methods, and findings about ways to use communication and computation technology to help groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations work collectively towards common goals.

Several years ago a program at the University of Maryland called “Webshop” (Web Workshop) was organized by Professor John Robinson and held for three consecutive Summers.  I visited and spoke at two of these events and know many people who attended or spoke at one or more and remember the event enthusiastically.   The students who attended include some of the now leading researchers in the field of social science studies of the internet.  There is an impressive alumni list.

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since. Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad,FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run.  Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind.  A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

After many years of inactivity, the Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) happened again!  With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, on August 23-26, 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students heard and engaged with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives.  Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event gathered students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies.   Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines applied to attend the 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP).  The workshop explored the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety.  The workshop attracted graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

-

Organizers

Alan Neustadtl (@smilex3md) - Sociology, University of Maryland
Jennifer Preece (@jenpre) – iSchool, University of Maryland
Marc Smith(@Marc_Smith) - Social Media Research Foundation
Ben Shneiderman (@benbendc) - Computer Science, University of Maryland
PJ Rey (@pjrey) - Sociology, University of Maryland, Student Coordinator

-

Photos

I will speak at Purdue University on September 22 and 23, 2011 about mapping social media networks.

My host is Sorin Matei, professor of Communications, who has been researching the social structure of social media networks.

I will also speak at Professor Matei’s class: COM 63200 On-line Interaction and Facilitation

Here is an example map of the connections among the people who tweeted the word “Purdue” on September 16th, 2011:

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Purdue when queried on September 16, 2011, scaled by numbers of tweets (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: www.purdue.edu/

Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.

(Edges connecting users are bundled and curved with recent features added to NodeXL v.177.)

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6155750905/sizes/o/in/ph…

Betweenness Centrality is defined here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm is defined here: pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i6/e066111

Top most between users:
@lifeatpurdue
@jajuanjohnson
@stfu_gabby
@purdueexponent
@charliienosheen
@mbrister2
@boilerfootball
@purduesports
@hipandresanbo
@cheesebrrrrr

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 4045
Edges With Duplicates: 706
Total Edges: 4751
Self-Loops: 977
Connected Components: 429
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 395
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 528
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4134
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 12
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.517707
Graph Density: 0.003507508
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.177

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.

2011 ASA meetings are being held in Las Vega, Nevada.  Several sessions are related to the study of the social uses and effects of information technology are hosted by the Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA).

These are the connections among the people who recently tweeted the term “ASA2011″ on 18 August 2011.

Several papers and panels related to the sociology of the internet will take place:

Saturday, Aug 20 – 2:30pm – 4:10pm

 124. Section on Sociology of Law Paper Session. Privacy in the Digital Age: Law, Culture, and Contention I (co-sponsored with the Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and Section on Communication and Information Technology)

Monday, Aug 22 – 8:30-9:30AM Roundtables

338. Section on Communication and Information Technology Roundtable Session

Monday, Aug 22 – 9:30-10:10AM Business and Awards Ceremony

(immediately follows roundtables)

Monday, Aug 22 – 10:30AM – 12:10PM 

376. Section on Communication and Information Technology Invited Session. Social Media in Community Action and Social Change

Monday, Aug 22 – 2:30pm – 4:10pm

419. Section on Communication and Information Technology Paper Session. New Media Frontiers: Youth and New Media

Monday, Aug 22 – 5:00-7:00PM, Section Reception, hotel suite, Caesars Palace

Location to be announced at all CITASA sessions and meetings.

Tuesday has the main day of panels and talks:

Tueday, August 23 – 10:30am – 12:10pm

514. Section on Sociology of Culture Invited Session. Privacy in the Digital Age II: Law, Culture, and Contention (co-sponsored with the Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and Section on Communication and Information Technology)

Regular Session. Social Participant On and Off the Internet.

Session Organizer: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Sunday 1030-12

The Active Few and the Sporadic Many: Making Sense of Opinion Dynamics in Online Review Systems
*Fedor Dokshin (Cornell University)

The Internet, Young Adults and Political Engagement around the 2008 Presidential Elections

*Aaron Shaw (University of California-Berkeley), Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University)

Social movements’ use of information and communication technologies: diffusion, usefulness and empowerment

*Piotr Konieczny (University of Pittsburgh)

*=presenter

———————————–

Regular Session. Networked Individuals On and Off the Internet

Scheduled Time: Sun, Aug 21 – 2:30pm – 4:10pm

Session Participants:

Session Organizer: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Presider: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)

“If you’re not texting me, you must be old:” Age Cohort Attachment to Mobile Phones
*Amanda M. Warr (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Shelia R. Cotten (University of Alabama at Birmingham), William A. Anderson (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

The Intersection of Gender and Place in Online Health Activities
*Melinda Goldner (Union College), Timothy M. Hale (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Shelia R. Cotten (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Michael J. Stern (College of Charleston), Patricia Drentea (University of Alabama-Birmingham)

Core Discussion Networks Over Time: How the Internet Reduces Social Isolation and Increases Network Diversity
*Keith N. Hampton (University of Pennsylvania), Lauren Sessions Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)

Social Network Sites, Social Ties, and Social Capital
*Randy Lynn (George Mason University), *James C. Witte (George Mason University)

Discussant: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)

———————————————————-

Regular Session. Digital Divides in the Internet Age
Scheduled Time: Mon, Aug 22 – 4:30pm – 6:10pm

Session Organizer: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Presider: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Cyberasociality and the Online Sociality Divide: Third Level Digital Divide?

*Zeynep Tufekci (University of Maryland-Baltimore County)
(Tech) Culture in Action: Using a cultural framework to describe and explain differences in technological competency

*Cassidy Puckett (Northwestern University)
Does the “Do-it-yourself approach” reduce digital inequality? Lack of digital skills and infrequent Internet use

*Uwe Matzat (Eindhoven University of Technology), Bert M. Sadowski (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Stalled Digital Divide: Gender Differences in the Use of ICT in Taiwan

*Yu-Hua Chen (National Taiwan University), Wen-Yin Chien (United Daily News)

 

Please vote on our SxSW 2012 panel:

Thanks for your vote for our SxSW panel!

Here is a map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term “AEJMC” on August 7, 2011:

The top most between people in this network are:@aejmc, @jlab, @karenrussell, @terryflynn, @natcomm, @tmccorkindale, @derigansilver, @tkell, @aejmconlineads, and @jeremyhl:

I will present a Workshop on Social Media Network Analysis and NodeXL at the 9 August 2011 – Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (http://www.aejmc.com) in St. Louis, Missouri along with my colleague Professor Hernando Rojas, from the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin – Madison.

See: http://www.aejmc.com/home/events/annual-convention/

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.

Our session is:

Using NodeXL for Social Network Analysis
Tuesday — 2 pm to 5 pm
Presented by Communication Theory and Methodology Division
This pre-conference workshop examines social network analysis. Social network analysis can be used to examine message boards, blogs, and friend networks (amongmany other phenomena). Participants will learn to use the NodeXL program to conduct a network analysis. For information, contact Michel M. Haigh, Pennsylvania State University at mmh25@psu.edu.

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

Several years ago a program at the University of Maryland called “Webshop” (Web Workshop) was organized by Professor John Robinson and held for three consecutive Summers.  I visited and spoke at two of these events and know many people who attended or spoke at one or more and remember the event enthusiastically.   The students who attended include some of the now leading researchers in the field of social science studies of the internet.  There is an impressive alumni list.

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since.  Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad, FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run.  Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind.  A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

The Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) is happening again!  With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, this August 23-26 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students will hear and engage with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives.  Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event will gather students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies.   Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines are invited to apply to attend this summer’s 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP).  The workshop explores the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety.  The workshop should be of interest to graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

For more information, please contact Alan Neustadtl (alan.neustadtl@gmail.com).

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Photos

I am very interested in the Quantified Self conference to be held in Mountain View, California, May 28 and 29.  While I have attended just a few of the in-person meet-ups, which were engaging and intriguing events, I have followed the blog and tweet stream closely.  These events feature short presentations about practices, prototypes, and products that record information about our own behavior and activity.  It is great to hear that, as the meet-ups grew to become very large, a conference has been organized to accommodate the demand and growing interest in the intersection of sensors and other devices with medical and personal self-monitoring.  Using a variety of devices, our lives can now create detailed inscriptions that illuminate our behavior and patterns with novel clarity and detail. (See: http://quantifiedself.com/conference/)

I plan to attend.  I will speak on Sunday morning at a 10:30 breakout session on using social media network analysis to map personal and collective social media spaces.

Quantifying the “Quantified Self” discussion in Twitter: Here is a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the string “quantified self” on May 25th, 2011.

Click for larger image.

The top most between participants in this graph were:

@timoreilly
@quantifiedself (-1)
@harscoat (-)
@edyson
@qsparis
@egadenne (-4)
@agaricus (-)
@brunoaziza
@adriana872
@chloester

Bolded users also appeared in a previous map made earlier in the year, on January 20, 2011, which looked like this:

This is the list of the most “between” users in this network on January 20th, 2011:

The most between participants in this graph are: @quantifiedself, @egadenne, @harscoat, @genomera, @neufit, @jxa, @agaricus, @emergentorder, @bulletproofexec, @2healthguru.

The topics discussed in the quantifiedself tweet stream can be rendered as a network graph based on words that co-occur:

29 June – 2 July 2011
Queensland University of Technology

Tweet with the hashtag #ct2011

http://ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/

C&T 2011 OVERVIEW

The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference is the premier international forum for stimulating scholarly debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies.

C&T 2011 welcomes participation from researchers, designers, educators, industry, and students from the many disciplines and perspectives bearing on the interaction between community and technology, including architecture, arts, business, design, economics, education, engineering, ergonomics, information technology, geography, health, humanities, law, media and communication studies, and social sciences. The conference program will include competitively selected, peer-reviewed papers, as well as pre-conference workshops, a doctoral consortium, and invited keynote and panel speakers.

Marcus Foth
Conference Chair

IMPORTANT DATES
30 April 2011: Workshop papers, Doctoral Consortium and Student Volunteer applications due
29 June 2011: Pre-conference workshops and Doctoral Consortium
30 June – 2 July 2011: C&T 2011 conference at QUT, Brisbane, Australia

CONFERENCE TOPICS

C&T 2011 welcomes contributions in all areas of community and technology research, design and development. In addition, we particularly invite authors to address any of the following topics:

Augmented Reality
Civic Intelligence
Context and Location Awareness
Community-centred Design and Evaluation Methodologies
Community Engagement
E-research with Communities
E-government and E-governance
Participation
Smart Community Services
Sustainability
Universal Usability and Accessibility
Urban Informatics
Tangible Interfaces for Community Interaction
Technologies of Scale Making
Visualisation Techniques
Working across Cultures

http://ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/

#ct2011

This is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the words #rw2011 when queried on April 28, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded), connected by replying, mentioning and following.

Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.

A larger version of the network map is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5666637994/sizes/o/

A detailed list of top most between users is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5666069249/

Top most between users: @nytimes, @skynews, @peoplemag, @royalweddingcnn, @itv_news, @katewilliam2011, @julieetchitv, @abc, @cbsnews, @abcroyals

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 1735
Edges With Duplicates: 531
Total Edges: 2266
Self-Loops: 0
Connected Components: 271
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 246
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 701
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 2199
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 11
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.892905
Graph Density: 0.001984985
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.166

NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.

I will be speaking at the Oxford Internet Institute on July 13 and 14, 2011 as part of the Summer Doctoral Program.

I will speak about the use of social network analysis and visualization techniques to analyze and understand social media.

The Summer Doctoral Program is designed to

…bring together advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research relating to the Internet and other ICTs. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their thesis research and create a peer network of excellent young researchers.

The 2011 Summer Doctoral Programme will draw substantially upon the OII’s research strengths and will involve participation from many of our faculty, together with colleagues from other partner institutions. It will emphasise methodological innovation and good practice in research design, and will expose students to the benefits of discussing their research in a multi-disciplinary teaching environment.”

I will be speaking at the Jacob T. Schwartz International School for Scientific Research week long Lipari School on Computational Social Science , July 17 – July 23, 2011, Lipari Island, Italy.

This year’s program is dedicated to Computational Social Science: Text and Decisions

Speakers:

• Claudio Cioffi-Revilla: Director of the Center for Social Complexity, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, Washington DC.
• Huan Liu: Community Detection and Mining in Social Media [abstract]
  School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University
• Roel Popping: Computer-assisted text analysis, and the relevance of decision making and text mining [abstract]
  Department of Sociology, University of Groningen

Tutorials

• Marc A. Smith: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Maps and Measures with NodeXL [abstract]
  Chief Social Scientist, Connected Action Consulting Group
• Calogero Zarba: Introduction to matrix algebra [abstract]
  Neodata Intelligence s.r.l., Italy
• Alessandro Pluchino: Netlogo: An agent based simulation programmable environment [abstract], University of Catania, Italy

Web Science Doctoral Summer School 2011

I will be attending and speaking at the upcoming 2011 Web Science Trust Graduate Summer School tobe held at DERI, NUI Galway Ireland from July 6th to July 13th, 2011.  I will speak about social media network analysis and run a workshop on using NodeXL.  There is a packed schedule featuring a great group of researchers who are gathering at the event, including:

* Prof. Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences.
* Prof. Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
* Prof. Stefan Decker is a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute.
* Dr. Harith Alani is a senior lecturer at the Knowledge Media Institute, where he is heading a group specialising in Social Semantics.
* Dr. Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He specializes in novel methods for online data capture and analysis, especially via social media.
* Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick has a background in physics (AB Princeton, PhD Harvard) and 15 years of developing new technologies at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center before coming to the Hebrew University in 2000.
* Prof. Enric Plaza holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and is Research Professor of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).
* Prof. Steffen Staab is the director of Institute WeST – Web Science and Technologies and of the Institute for Computer Science of the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
* Dr. Derek Greene is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin. As part of the Clique Research Cluster, his focus is on network analysis and community finding, with a particular emphasis on dynamic mobile and social media networks.
* Dr. Michael Hausenblas is a Research Fellow at DERI, NUI Galway, where he leads the Linked Data Research Centre.
* Dr. Daniele Quercia is Horizon researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK). he is interested in computational social science, web science, and social computing.
* Dr. Markus Strohmaier is an Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute, Faculty of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology.

The event is focused on the methods and theories needed to grasp the nature of the social implications of the rapid changes in the technologies of communication and computation:

“The Web is the largest technological artefact in existence, comprising a global network of information sites and services. It is a social machine, delivering information between people and communities, embedded in almost all processes of human society: education, medicine, science and technology, commerce, entertainment and social activity. It is often simply supposed that the Web is a neutral technology, a stable computing platform for the delivery of information and services. What is overlooked is that the Web is changing constantly in response to the demands of human society. Incremental innovations leads to changes in how people use the Web and in turn how Web technology responds to changed human interaction. Small technological decisions influence how individuals use the Web and ripple out to have unanticipated macro-effects. Sometimes these effects are beneficial such as the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Other technologies such as the rise of spam bots or ‘blackhat’ search engine optimisation techniques clutter the Web with irrelevant, distracting information. While influential corporations such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft generate huge revenues from the Web, the Web itself is owned by everyone and no-one. We need to fully understand the demands placed on the Web by human society, so that its fate does not lead to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but to a sustainable technological resource for the future.”

http://webscience.deri.ie/index.html

Read More

Here is a recipe for finding and building collections of influential Twitter users relevant to your goal and message.

A common question related to social media that I am often asked is: “how do we grow our twitter followers?”  I try to re-frame that question as “how can we get our message viewed by the right people?” and its related question: “who could best pass our message along?”

The goal is not to gain many followers, but rather to gain well positioned followers!  A well positioned follower is someone who talks about topics related to your topic and is located at the center of many relationships with other people in that topic network.  These highly central people are able to get their message to be visible to many people. If they re-tweet you, your message will go far.  Why would they re-tweet you?  First, they have to be able to hear you to re-tweet you and that means that you need to get these people to follow you.  Second, you need to say something sensible enough to be worth re-tweeting.

The task is finding the important users to focus on.  To find them, create a network map of the relevant topics.  A few people in these network maps will occupy key positions in which they have many connections or have special ties that bridge gaps between sub-groups.  There are often only a few of these people in any topic area.

Find these strategically located people and follow them and often they will follow you back. A good proxy for the strategic value of a person’s location is their “betweenness centrality” – a measure of how much a person acts a bridge between others.

If the people you select and follow do not immediately follow you back there is another opportunity to get them to follow you.  If you re-tweet particularly good content from the people you have selected to follow there is a good chance that you will be followed back.

Once you have identified, followed, and been followed back by some fraction of the influential people around your topics of interest you have a increased chance that your tweets will be re-tweeted.  For each re-tweet, your message is exposed to a potentially large and highly targeted group of people.  Over time it is possible to create a relationship with a collection of highly influential participants who may be interested in sharing your message with their followers.

The event is a globally visible opportunity for the President of the United States to present the Administration’s vision for its agenda for the year to the people of the US and the world.

The hashtag #stateoftheunion is already very active in Twitter.

This is a NodeXL map of the connections among people who recently tweeted the string “stateoftheunion” on 21 January, 2011.

The most between user, @keitholbermann, is highlighted.  Two major clusters emerge, shown arbitrarily here as green and blue, and which are more clearly seen in the filtered graph below the list.

Summary network statistics:

Graph Type Directed
Vertices 1259
Unique Edges 8014
Edges With Duplicates 544
Total Edges 8558
Connected Components 306
Single-Vertex Connected Components 293
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 937
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 8513
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 9
Average Geodesic Distance 3.140191
Graph Density 0.00522786

The most “between” contributors in the network are:

@keitholbermann, @borowitzreport, @thefix, @katyinindy,
@america1first, @wbconservative, @westwingreport, @dailykos,
@writer2go, and @gottalaff

When contributors with low “betweenness” are filtered out of the graph, two dominant clusters become easier to discern.  To the left are supporters of the President and to the right are those critical of the Administration.  A representative tweet from this cluster is highlighted.

I returned to South Africa to attend the 2010 edition of Mobile Web Africa, a conference focused on the remarkable adoption and development of mobile networks and technology in Africa.

The conference took place on 29th & 30th September 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I presented a workshop on social media network analysis, see: http://www.mobilewebafrica.com/marc-smith-workshop.php

The conference twitter hashtag #MWA2010 received a significant amount of traffic.  I mapped the collection of collections formed when people who tweeted “#MWA2010″ also followed, replied, or mentioned one another.  The following two EventMaps of the #MWA2010 twitter hashtag illustrates the development of the network.

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on October 5th, 2010

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on September 29th, 2010

The later graph is defined by three leading contributors who each generated significant retweeting along with mentions and replies.

I attended the previous 2009 Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, organized by AllAmber Media which also featured a focus on the next wave of mobile devices and services.

Mobile is BIG in Africa.  The “Remote control of the Universe” = Mobile Phone.

The speaker from Samsung last year noted that for many Africans, the mobile device is their first and main method for managing digital objects.  A phone is not just a phone, it is a still and video camera, music player, watch, web browser, flashlight, wallet and file system.

The representative from Yonder Mobile Media noted that mobile phones have now exceeded the installed base of the previously most widely used communication technology: FM Radio.  But mobile is different from FM: mobile devices are two way, provide a method for exchanging payments, and are a primary method of access to the internet for many billions of people.  Mobile is the “first” screen for many people in Africa, not the third screen role that it plays in more developed economies.  Regional services like MXIT and The Grid are offering Internet services tailored to affordable mobile devices.

Photos from this year’s event:

Photos from last year’s event:

Photos from Cape Town: