Connected Action

If you are attending the CHI 2010 conference in Atlanta and are interested in social media network analysis, consider attending this tutorial:
CN03: Introduction to Social Network Analysis
Time: Monday, 12 April 2010, 11:30 to 18:00
Organizers: Marc A. Smith, Panayiotis Zaphiris, C.S. Ang, Derek Hansen
Benefits
This course provides an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and demonstrates through [...]

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I will attend and speak at a symposium being heldMarch 24-25, 2010 at the IE University Department of Communication in Segovia, Spain.  The topic is: Transnational connections: Challenges and opportunities for communication.
“The Symposium aims to generate discussion on cutting-edge ideas in political communication, encourage international cooperation and unite scholars and practitioners.”
The symposium is organized with Center for Global [...]

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The Annual Meeting of the Israel Internet Association (http://www.isoc.org.il (English)) was held February 22-23 2010. I spoke at this year’s meeting: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2010/agenda.php?lang=en
Part 1

Part 2

The previous year’s conference website is at: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2009/program.php
The Israel Internet Association is the official Israeli Chapter of the Internet Society.  Their annual meeting is a central event of academics (sociologists, psychologists, [...]

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After speaking at the Israel Internet Association conference February 22, I will speak at IBM Research in Haifa at an event co-sponsored by the University of Haifa Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the M.A. program in Sociology of Technology.  My hosts are Professor Gustavo Mesch from the university and Dr. Adam Perer from IBM [...]

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I will attend an interesting discussion organized by Jeff Ubois on February 16th at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.
Saving Our Present for the Future: Personal Archiving 2010
From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial information, vital personal records are becoming digital. At the same time, creation and capture of new digital information [...]

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Time for another NodeXL update: sparklines!  Sparklines are a nifty and compact way of displaying a line chart in a small area.
Setting dynamic filters in NodeXL has been somewhat like rummaging around in the dark: without a way to see the distribution beneath a filter the user only knows the max and min values, not [...]

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In the most recent prior release of NodeXL we added new metrics that describe networks in terms of their number of components and the length of paths in those networks.  In this release we automate creation of histograms of network metrics.  It is useful to see the distribution of attributes like in-degree or betweenness to [...]

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Along with Professors Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) and Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) from the University of Maryland I am writing and editing a book about analyzing the social media networks that form whenever people link or reply to one another, favorite, rate, read, or edit data about other people or their objects.  Social media [...]

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NodeXL has updated again (v.1.0.1.109) with new network metrics.  The application now calculates path length data for your network, reporting the Maximum Geodesic Distance and the Average Geodesic Distance.  The list of overall metrics NodeXL creates includes: Vertices (the number of nodes in the graph), Unique Edges, Edges With Duplicates, Total Edges, Self-Loops (Edges that point back at the node [...]

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NodeXL updated starting with version 1.05 with features that make it fairly easy to create basic “Venn Diagrams”.  A Venn diagram is a familiar way to illustrate the overlap (or lack thereof) of two or more “sets” of things.
There are some very amusing Venn diagrams out there!  This one in particular made me laugh but [...]

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Network visualizations can be very compelling but they are often a smear of unintelligible nodes and edges without refinement and filtering.  Creating an automated layout for a complex graph is a challenging area of mathematics and computer science.  Several layouts are available and are widely implemented, including the Fruchterman-Reingold layout, the Harel-Koren fast multilevel layout, [...]

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Here is a recent slidedeck that provides an overview of NodeXL and social media network analysis.
2009 December NodeXL Overview
View more presentations from Marc Smith.

The deck illustrates the use of NodeXL to extract several social media networks from systems like twitter and facebook to generate maps of communities and identify people and objects in key locations.

Share [...]

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NodeXL has had a rudimentary flickr tag network data spigot for some time but we have just added a number of features to this data importer that makes it much more useful.
You can now select the number of network levels to include, an optional sample image file can be included for each tag, and the [...]

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Video is now available from a panel hosted by the Women’s Affinity Group of O’Melveny & Myers’ Silicon Valley Office in Menlo Park on November 19th.  Along with Karla Spormann, President and CEO Tendo Communications, Martin Eberhard, Co-founder and former CEO Tesla Motors, Patrick Ewers, Founder, Mindmavin LLC.  We spoke about “Using Social Media to Grow [...]

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Starting in version 100 NodeXL has added a data import feature for extracting social networks from the associations between users and videos in YouTube.  The new social media network data spigot offers insights into the ways YouTube is socially structured.  This spigot joins the existing twitter, flickr, and email data import providers present in NodeXL. [...]

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