Ines Mergel is my host.  Prof. Mergel is Assistant Professor of Public Administration, Department of Public Administration and International Affairs, and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Information Policy at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, NY.

I will speak about the patterns we are finding in the data collected and analyzed by NodeXL.

On November 9th and 10th, 2011 the LocalSocialSummit11 will be held in London.

On Thursday morning, November 10th, Doctor Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute and member of the Social Media Research Foundation will speak on the topic:

Insights: Social Network Analysis On Facebook Data, with a local twist

Thursday at 3:45 I will speak at the event on:

Charting Collections Of Connections In Social Media

Following the conference from 5 to 6pm will be a reception for the Social Media Research Foundation.

Please join us for refreshments and a discussion of the ways social media analysis tools can guide your engagement with stakeholders around the world.

The event is held at wallacespace:

22 Duke’s Road, London, WC1H 9PN
t +44(0)20 7395 1265
f +44 (0)20 7836 9591
e ask@wallacespace.com

22 Duke’s Road is only minutes walk away from Euston, St Pancras International, King’s Cross and Russell Square Tube.

Registration form for attending the event is below….

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

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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.

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).

-

Photos

• Group Frames: If your graph has groups and you choose to lay out the groups in their own boxes (NodeXL, Graph, Layout, Layout Options), you can now specify the width of the box outlines.

• Constant Edges: When you select an edge, its width no longer changes. NodeXL used to use the same width for all selected edges, even if the edges had varying widths when unselected.
• Group and Vertex Display Harmony:
  • When a graph has groups, you now have more control over how the groups are shown. Go to NodeXL, Analysis, Groups, Group Options.
  • The NodeXL, Show/Hide, Graph Elements, Groups menu item has been replaced with a checkbox in the Group Options dialog box.

  

• Right-Click Group Controls: Menu items for selecting, expanding, collapsing and removing groups are now available in the menu that appears when you right-click the graph pane. (These are just shortcuts for the same menu items that are available in the Ribbon at NodeXL, Analysis, Groups.)

• WYSIWYCC: What You See Is What You Can Click -
  • Hidden edges and vertices (those that have their Visibility cells set to Hide) can no longer be selected in the graph pane.
  • Edges and vertices that have been filtered (NodeXL, Analysis, Dynamic Filters) can no longer be selected in the graph pane.
• Bigger Twitter Lists: When importing a Twitter list network (NodeXL, Import, From Twitter List Network), you can now enter up to 10,000 usernames. The maximum used to be 500.
• UCINET / Matrix Compatibility: Bug fix: When exporting the graph to a UCINET file (NodeXL, Data, Export, To UCINET Full Matrix DL File), isolated vertices didn’t get exported. When exporting the graph to a new matrix workbook (NodeXL, Data, Export, To New Matrix Workbook), isolated vertices didn’t get exported, when importing a graph from a matrix workbook (NodeXL, Data, Import, From Open Matrix Workbook), isolated vertices didn’t get imported. Now they do!

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

http://www.ischools.org/iConference11/2011index/

Our paper, Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia,  about the variety of  roles people perform in Wikis received the best paper award (along with 4 others) in a field of 86 papers.   The 2011 iConference accepted 86 papers, and had about 550 attendees.

The paper is authored by: Howard T. Welser at Ohio University, Austin Lin at Cornell University and Microsoft, Dan Cosley, Fedor Dokshin, Gueorgi Kossinets and Geri Gay at  Cornell University, and Marc Smith from Connected Action.

The paper pdf pre-print is available here: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~welser/Welser.Cosley.plus.Wiki.Roles.pdf

The link to the ACM abstract and pdf: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940778&CFID=9933318&CFTOKEN=58981138

Abstract: This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and social networkers. Patterns in edit histories and egocentric network visualizations suggest potential “structural signatures” that could be used as quantitative indicators of role adoption. Using simple metrics based on edit histories we compare two samples of Wikipedians: a collection of long term dedicated editors, and a cohort of editors from a one month window of new arrivals. According to these metrics, we find that the proportions of editor types in the new cohort are similar those observed in the sample of dedicated contributors. The number of new editors playing helpful roles in a single month’s cohort nearly equal the number found in the dedicated sample. This suggests that informal socialization has the potential provide sufficient role related labor despite growth and change in Wikipedia. These results are preliminary, and we describe several ways that the method can be improved, including the expansion and refinement of role signatures and identification of other important social roles.

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

Today, we release a new NodeXL feature in version  .164  that we think will improve the results generated by other layout algorithms: Group Layout.  In the Layout Options menu in the NodeXL Network Graph Pane (called “Document Actions” by Excel) you will find that the dialog box has been updated:

Selecting the new “Lay out each of the graph’s groups in its own box and sort the boxes by group size” option and checking the “Show each box’s outline” can generate an image that neatly places each group in a bounded region.

Here we see the set of connections among the people who tweeted the string “msrtf11 OR techfest” – referring to the Microsoft Research TechFest 2011 event that took place in early March in Redmond, Washington.  This map clarifies the set of set of relationships among sub-groups within the graph.

Contrast this with the layout created without this feature turned on:

We still have some refinements coming that will improve this layout further (for example, the neat grid of isolated nodes takes an extra step today, we will try to make that happen automatically soon) but this is a nice step in making network graphs easier to understand.  Let us know what you think!

Institute for Communication Technology Management

http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/centers/ctm/events

On March 10th, 2011 I will speak on a panel at the USC Marshall School of Business Institute for Communication Technology Management Executive Roundtable.

]]> http://www.connectedaction.net/2011/03/05/10-march-2011-usc-marshall-school-of-business-communication-technology-executive-roundtable/feed/ 0 http://www.connectedaction.net/2011/01/09/hicss-2011-paper-eventgraphs-charting-collections-of-conference-connections/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hicss-2011-paper-eventgraphs-charting-collections-of-conference-connections http://www.connectedaction.net/2011/01/09/hicss-2011-paper-eventgraphs-charting-collections-of-conference-connections/#comments Sun, 09 Jan 2011 14:00:29 +0000 Marc Smith http://www.connectedaction.net/?p=3585

A recent paper “EventGraphs: Charting Collections of Conference Connections” by Marc Smith from Connected Action, Professor Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) and Professor Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) both from the University of Maryland and has been accepted for publication at the 2011 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Conference.  This is the 44th year for the conference. Derek Hansen presented the paper on January 7, 2011.

Hansen, D., Smith, M., Shneiderman, B., EventGraphs: charting collections of conference connections. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Forty-Forth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). January 4-7, 2011. Kauai, Hawaii.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reports-search.php?number=2010-13

Our paper is about visualizing social media and it describes the visualization of the patterns of connections formed when people tweet about events like conferences and news stories.

EventGraphs are social media network diagrams constructed from content selected by its association with time-bounded events, such as conferences. Many conferences now communicate a common “hashtag” or keyword to identify messages related to the event. EventGraphs help make sense of the collections of connections that form when people follow, reply or mention one another and a keyword. This paper defines EventGraphs, characterizes different types, and shows how the social media network analysis add-in NodeXL supports their creation and analysis. The paper also identifies the structural and conversational patterns to look for and highlight in EventGraphs and provides design ideas for their improvement.

A collection of EventGraphs are available in flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157625618025980/

The EventGraph for HICSS this year is here: 20110109-NodeXL-Twitter-HICSS

The top most between contributors to the HICSS Twitter graph this year are: @arcticpenguin @avantgame @barrywellman @clifflampe @dalprof @chandlerism @shakmatt @marc_smith @shen045 and @thecatandthekey

Here is the data set: 20110109-NodeXL-Twitter-HICSS
Graph Metric Value
Graph Type Directed
Vertices 92
Unique Edges 243
Edges With Duplicates 71
Total Edges 314
Self-Loops 0
Connected Components 21
Single-Vertex Connected Components 18
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 69
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 307
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 8
Average Geodesic Distance 3.081693
Graph Density 0.032967033

NodeXL Version 1.0.1.159

An article about social media visualization Social Seen: Analyzing and Visualizing Data from Social Networks by Hunter Whitney, appeared in UX Magazine on December 15, 2010.  It provides a great round up of tools and approaches to mapping populations in social media spaces.

Previous HICSS papers:

Gleave, Eric, Howard T. Welser, Marc Smith, and Thomas Lento.  2009.  “A conceptual and operational definition of social role in online community.”   In Proceedings of the 42nd  Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), January 5-8. Computer Society Press.  (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Mini-Track)

2009 – HICSS – 42 – Best Paper – A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community

Fisher, D., Smith, M., and Welser, H. You Are Who You Talk To, Proceedings of HICSS, January 2006. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Program)

http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/2006-HICSS-You-Are-Who-You-Talk-To-Detecting-Roles-in-Usenet-Newsgroups.pdf

Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. “Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces“, Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004. (Best Paper: Persistent Conversation Minitrack)

http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/2004-HICSS-Viegas-and-Smith-Newsgroup-Crowds-and-Author-Lines.pdf

Here are some sample event graphs:

CONNECTING THE DOTS
A Network Visualization Symposium

http://networks.iq.harvard.edu/

Date: October 22, 2010
The first CONNECTING THE DOTS symposium on network visualization organized by Michael Barnett, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, and Samuel Arbesman of The Christakis Lab at Harvard was held on October 22, 2010.

Keynote speakers:

Alessandro Vespignani, Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
Ben Fry, co-developer of Processing and data visualization expert

The NodeXL project will be represented by Ben Shneiderman who will speak at 2:00 PM on:

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL

Complete draft program for Connecting_the_Dots…

Program

10:15 AM Keynote I: Ben Fry (Fathom)

11:00 AM SocioPatterns
Wouter van Der Broeck, (ISI Foundation)

The SocioPatterns project developed an active-RFID based sociometric platform capable of sensing mutual proximity in a distributed, scalable fashion. This platform enables a large-scale, real-time assessment of the dynamics of person-to-person interaction network with a fine temporal and spatial granularity. The initial focus of this project was on empirical data collection in support of research on dynamic social interaction networks and infection dynamics. Various experiments also explored the potential of the platform for more service oriented applications, and artscience contexts. The SocioPattens platform has been deployed in more than a dozen settings, ranging from conferences and tradeshows, over primary schools, long-term public exhibitions, artscience projects, and domestic settings.

11:25 AM Visualizing Countrywide Traffic Dynamics
Wen Dong (MIT)

It is often a challenge to reveal the human mobility patterns in multi-gigabyte vehicle tracking data spanning a whole country and many years. We address this problem through a Markov model of how people drive in the road network, and animations of road-traffic conditions on top of Google Maps. We welcome researchers to use our visualization tool set.

12:50 PM Keynote II: Alessandro Vespignani (Indiana University)

1:35 PM Network Visualization Using Processing
Sergiy Nesterko (Harvard University)

Network, or relational data are becoming of increasing interest to researchers in different disciplines, partly because related problems are very hard to solve due to complex structure of underlying datasets. It is well known that a picture is worth a thousand words, and especially for networks related problems, visualization has become an invaluable tool in gaining intuition that helps tackle them. As an example, we consider network visualization using Processing as applied to problems in respondent-driven sampling, which is a variant of link tracing process to explore social networks of hard-to-reach populations. We emphasize the role of a compelling visualization in a successful research endeavor and briefly describe how Processing can be used to make it.

2:00 PM Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL
Ben Shneiderman (Univ. of Maryland, College Park)

NodeXL is the free and open add-in for Excel 2007/2010 that supports network overview, discovery and exploration. Supported by Microsoft External Research for 3+ years, this effort has produced a game-changing software tool that enables students, researchers, and professional community managers to extract and download networks from email, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, WWW, etc. Then they can compute network analytic metrics, filter out less relevant features, apply multiple layout algorithms, and produce compelling yet comprehensible displays that reveal actionable insights about complex social processes.

2:25 PM FacetAtlas: Multifaceted Visualization for Rich-context Networks
Yu-Ru Lin (Harvard University and Northeastern University)

FacetAtlas is a multifaceted visualization technique for analyzing interconnected text documents. FacetAtlas combines search technology with advanced visual analytical tools to convey both global and local patterns simultaneously. The power of FacetAtlas is demonstrated through a case study that targets patient education in the health care domain.

3:35 PM Pathline: A Tool for Exploring Biological Data in the Context of Molecular Networks

Miriah Meyer (Harvard University)

Pathline is an interactive tool that visualizes the biologically interesting relationships between multiple molecular networks, the activity levels of multiple genes, and the evolutionary relatedness of multiple species. Working in close collaboration with a group of genomics scientists we designed Pathline around a representation of a linearized network that provides appropriate topological information and supports the comparison of quantitative data. We validated the efficacy of Pathline to both confirm existing knowledge and discover new scientific insights through a series of case studies.

4:00 PM Is Network Visualization Even Useful?
John Dila (Innocentive)

Our company, InnoCentive Inc. (innocentive.com) is an Open Innovation marketplace, which connects Seeker companies (that have tractable problems they have not been able to solve) with our Global Solver Community of experts, specialists, and generalists who sign up to solve tough, meaningful problems. As part of a website redesign, we wanted to update the way we graphically display data about our global Solver network. By “eating our own dog-food” we posted a challenge on our platform asking for solutions to how we can best visualize a selected data set about our global Solver population in order to drive traffic to our site and add value to customers and the business. We received 10 solutions and they are currently under evaluation. We will present our challenge process, the results of the visualization challenge, and how we plan to use them moving forward.

I spoke at the University of Michigan, School of Information on October 19th, 2010 about “Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Mapping and Measuring Social Media Networks to Find Key Positions and Structures“.

I demonstrated the ways social network data sets can be extracted from social media services like Facebook, Twitter, email, YouTube, and flickr.  These network graphs can reveal information about the “shape” of the population in terms of the presence of sub-groups and communities within the larger population.  In addition, each individual participant is located or positioned within the graph, helping to identify the people who are “core” versus those who are peripheral, as well as those who occupy the position of “bridge” between two otherwise separate groups.

Yahoo! Speaker Series

The Yahoo Speaker Series at the School of Information supports distinguished guest lecturers from the fields of information and technology.

2010 Speaker: Marc Smith
VIDEO: Marc Smith

Marc Smith, chief social scientist with the Connected Action Social Group, presented “Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Mapping and Measuring Social Media Networks to Find Key Positions and Structures,” on Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010.

Smith’s talk was sponsored by the Yahoo! Speaker Series, Michigan Interactive & Social Computing, and the School of Information.

In this talk, Smith described how networks are a data structure common across all social media systems — systems defined by enabling populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation‘s NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. Using NodeXL, networks become as easy to create and analyze as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and e-mail networks will be presented, illustrating different patterns created when communities, brands, and controversies are discussed.

2010 - Sept - UC Davis CTSA SNA Community Engagement

CTSA Community Engagement and Social Network Analysis Workshop
September 22-24, 2010
University of California Davis
Clinical and Translational Science Center
Sacramento, California

OBJECTIVES

• Understand the basic concepts, tools, and techniques of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and how they relate to the evaluation of CTSAs and their impact on community research networks.
• Have sufficient exposure to a basic software tool for inputting and analyzing network data in order to undertake a simple social network analysis.
• Enumerate some possible uses of SNA and how to develop data collection tools or use existing sources to study the process and impact of CTSA on community engaged research.
• List primary authors of SNA analyses relevant to CTSA and community engaged research.

Presentation by Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University

10:30-Noon Demonstration of NodeXL Software

Marc Smith.

NodeXL is a free and open add-in for Excel that supports network overview, discovery and exploration. A contributor to NodeXL will provide basic instruction in its use, how to generate useful network statistics and metrics, how to create visualizations of network graphs and how to filter and display attributes that can be used to highlight important structures in networks.

1:00-1:45 Using NodeXL

Joe Hunt, MPH, Indiana University (with Marc Smith)

Using NodeXL to visualize interactions between investigators and CTSA key functions.

The Second Workshop on Information in Networks
September 24-25, 2010, New York City

Sponsored in part by the Initiative on Information in Networks
Organizers: Sinan Aral, Foster Provost, Arun Sundararajan

The second Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN10) will be held this year September 24-25, 2010, again in New York City. From the program description:

“Last year’s workshop brought together a small yet influential community around topics that at their core involve ‘information in networks‘—its distribution, its diffusion, its value, and its influence on social and economic outcomes. Scholars from fields as diverse as computer science, economics, information systems, marketing, physics, political science and sociology came together to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a multidisciplinary research community. This year’s workshop will build on this foundation toward bringing more innovative content and vibrant discussion to the forum. Speakers will share their recent research, which may have been published elsewhere, but which may not be widely known outside of their own disciplines. The workshop will combine invited and contributed talks with poster presentations selected from a pool of submitted abstracts. We hope the energy of New York City will inspire the gathering, and that our participants will leave with new ideas and a renewed sense of community.”

Ben Shneiderman and Jenny Preece will speak about their work on social media applied to national priorities with a talk titled: “Promoting National Initiatives for Technology-Mediated Social Participation“.  The talk includes their work creating NSF workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (www.tmsp.umd.edu), the paper Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation (which appeared in the AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction in March 2009), and recent work with the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), and  NodeXL projects.  Here is the abstract.

WIN10 speakers include:
==============================
Ron Burt, University of Chicago
Nicholas Christakis, Harvard University
Nathan Eagle, MIT
Sanjeev Goyal, Cambridge University
Matthew Jackson, Stanford University
Jenny Preece, University of Maryland
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
Tony Jebara, Columbia University
David Jensen, University of Massachussetts
Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
Rachel Kranton, Duke University
David Lazer, Northeastern University
Mark Newman, University of Michigan (tentative)
Alex Sandy Pentland, MIT
Alessandro Vespignani, Indiana University
Stanley Wasserman, Indiana University
Duncan Watts, Yahoo! Research

The book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is now available [Amazon] from Morgan-Kaufman. Co-authored by Professor Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) and Professor Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) from the University of Maryland and Marc Smith from Connected Action, the book is a introduction and guide to the application of social network analysis to social media.  The introductory chapters introduce the history and concepts of social network analysis an the varieties of social media, highlighting the presence of a common data structure, the network, in otherwise diverse social media systems including email, Twitter, Facebook, the WWW, Wikis, Blogs, flickr, an YouTube.  The central section of the book reviews a step-by-step guide to using the key features of NodeXL, the free and open social media network analysis add-in for Excel 2007 and 2010.  Readers can move from simple hand entered networks of a few nodes up to complex graphs extracted from a variety of social media services.  The remainder of the book are focused chapters dedicated to analyzing the networks found within a specific social media service.  These chapters were contributed by leading social media researchers and illustrate the insights that can be extracted from the otherwise disorganized stream of messages, tweets, posts, comments, links, likes, tags, friends, follows, mentions, replies and ratings.  A recent article about the book can be found on the Morgan-Kaufmann website.

Table of contents…

I. Getting Started with Analyzing Social Media Networks

[Chapter 1]: Introduction to Social Media and Social Networks
[Chapter 2]: Social media: New Technologies of Collaboration
[Chapter 3]: Social Network Analysis: Measuring, Mapping, and Modeling Collections of Connections

II. NodeXL Tutorial: Learning by Doing

[Chapter 4]: Getting Started with NodeXL, Layout, Visual Design, and Labeling
[Chapter 5]: Calculating and Visualizing Network Metrics
[Chapter 6]: Preparing Data and Filtering
[Chapter 7]: Clustering and Grouping

III Social Media Network Analysis Case Studies

[Chapter 8]: Email: The Lifeblood of Modern Communication
[Chapter 9]: Thread Networks: Mapping Message Boards and Email Lists

[Chapter 10]: Twitter: Conversation, Entertainment and Information, All in One Network!

By Vladimir Barash and Scott Golder

[Chapter 11]: Visualizing and Interpreting Facebook Networks

By Bernie Hogan

[Chapter 12]: WWW Hyperlink Networks

By Robert Ackland

[Chapter 13]: Flickr: Linking People, Photos, and Tags

By Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues and Natasa Milic-Frayling

[Chapter 14]: YouTube: Contrasting Patterns of Interaction and Prominence

By Dana Rotman and Jennifer Golbeck

[Chapter 15]: Wiki Networks: Networks of Creativity and Collaboration

By Howard T. Welser, Patrick Underwood, Dan Cosley, Derek Hansen, and Laura Black

http://jossviz.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/friendwheel-layout-of-a-facebook-network/

The Journal of Social Structure (JoSS) is an electronic journal of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA).  Here is Bernie’s description of the graph.

This is a “pinwheel” diagram using the author’s Facebook personal network (captured July 15, 2009).

Nodes represent the author’s friends and links represent friendships among them. The author is not shown. Each ‘wing’ radiating outwards is a partition using a greedy community detection algorithm (Wakita and Tsurumi, 2007). Wings are manually labelled. Node ordering within each wing is based on degree. Node color and size is also based on degree. Nodes position is based on a polar coordinate system: each node is on an equal angle of n/360º with a radius being a log-scaled measure of betweenness. Higher values are closer to the center indicating a sort of cross-partition ‘gravity’.

This layout has several notable features:

- The angle of each wing is proportionate to its share of the network. Thus 25 percent of nodes go from 0 to 90º.

- Partitions are distinguished by their position rather than a node’s color or shape.

- The tail indicates the periphery of each partition. A wing with many tail nodes indicates many people who are only tied to other group members.

- Edges crossing the center show between-partition connections. Since nodes are sorted by degree it is easy to see if edges originate from the most highly connected nodes or the entire partition.

Bernie’s chapter on analyzing Facebook networks with NodeXL appears in the book: Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world.

There is a Stanford Media X event on July 22nd, 2010 on new tools for SNA:

Network Analysis Made Easy:  Using NodeXL To Map Social Media Networks

http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/marc.html

Bring a laptop (running Windows and Office 2007 or 2010) to this workshop and you can be analyzing a social media network from systems like Twitter, flickr, YouTube and your own email by the end of the day.  If you can make a pie-chart in Excel, using the free and open NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) you can now make a rich network graph from data extracted from social media systems and other common formats.  If you have a network, bring it, if not you can bring a suggested topic that we can map during the course of the day.

Even if you leave your laptop behind or have a Mac (sorry, no version is yet available for MacOS – unless you have a virtual machine with Windows and Office) this workshop will introduce the core concepts of network science with application to social networks in general and social media networks in particular. Applied to a range of topics and services, social media network maps can illuminate a variety of “publics” – populations who share a common interest and may share connections.  Maps of topics like “oil spill”, “global warming” and other issue and event related keywords can reveal the groups and factions that cluster around different concepts and terms.  Key contributors in these maps can be identified through the application of network measurements that capture various aspects of a  person’s location in a network graph.

A new paper on visualizing social media has been released on the University of Maryland, Human Computer Interaction Laboratory tech report archive.  Co-authored by Derek Hansen,  myself, and Ben Shneiderman, the paper describes and visualizes the patterns of connections formed when people tweet about events like conferences and news stories.

EventGraphs_2010_HCIL_Tech_Report

http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reports-search.php?number=2010-13

Hansen, D., Smith, M., Shneiderman, B.
EventGraphs: Charting Collections of Conference Connections
HCIL-2010-13

EventGraphs are social media network diagrams constructed from content selected by its association with time-bounded events, such as conferences. Many conferences now communicate a common “hashtag” or keyword to identify messages related to the event. EventGraphs help make sense of the collections of connections that form when people follow, reply or mention one another and a keyword. This paper defines EventGraphs, characterizes different types, and shows how the social media network analysis add-in NodeXL supports their creation and analysis. The paper also identifies the structural and conversational patterns to look for and highlight in EventGraphs and provides design ideas for their improvement.