Connected Action

Sociology and the Internet, Social Media, and Mobile Social Software

University of Haifa and IBM Research talk on Social Media Networks, February 24, 2010

February 13th, 2010 · 2 Comments

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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Tags: Collective Action · Connected Action · IBM · NodeXL · Research · Social Interaction · Social Media · Social Network Analysis · Social network · Talks · University · Visualization

NodeXL update: v.1.0.110 – New histograms of network metrics on Overall Metrics worksheet

February 4th, 2010 · No Comments

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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Tags: Measuring social media · Metrics · Network metrics and measures · Research · Social Media · Social Network Analysis · Sociology

Book in progress: “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World”

January 30th, 2010 · 4 Comments

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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Tags: Book · NodeXL · Research · Social Media · Social network · Visualization

Component Binning: a network layout improvement in NodeXL v.108

January 14th, 2010 · 3 Comments

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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Tags: Network visualization layouts · NodeXL · Social network · Visualization

YouTube user and video networks in NodeXL v100+

November 28th, 2009 · 1 Comment

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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Tags: Measuring social media · NodeXL · Research · Social network · Video · Visualization · YouTube

More networks from Slate: Interesting use of network diagram for data display

September 25th, 2009 · No Comments

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 [...]

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Tags: Collective Action · Social Media · Social network · Visualization

Paper (using NodeXL!): Tweet the Debates: Understanding Community Annotation of Uncollected Sources

September 25th, 2009 · No Comments

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, [...]

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Tags: Collective Action · Measuring social media · Metrics · NodeXL · Papers · Politics · Social Interaction · Social Media · Social network · Sociology · Twitter

Bernie Hogan’s Facebook Social Network Data Provider and Visualization toolkit

September 12th, 2009 · 1 Comment

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

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

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Tags: Data Mining · Facebook · Measuring social media · Social Roles · Social network · Sociology · Visualization