Connected Action

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

Here is an interesting use of a network diagram for data display:

http://sdn.slate.com/features/endofamerica/EOANetwork.htm
Readers Who Like This Apocalypse Also Preferred …
The end-of-America social network.
Slate’s “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” game asked readers to browse
through a list of 144 end-of-America scenarios and choose up to five
that seem most likely to wipe the United States off the map. The
scenarios our [...]

[Read more →]

A recent paper makes use of NodeXL to create illustrations of data from connections among twitter users drawn from the United States presidential debates in October 2008.  One illustration highlights the major clusters in the network.

Tweet the Debates: Understanding Community Annotation of Uncollected Sources

Authors: Shamma, D.A.; Kennedy, L.; Churchill, E.F.
Source: ACM Multimedia, ACM, [...]

[Read more →]

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

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

[Read more →]