Connected Action

Here is a map of connections among people who recently tweeted the term “peoplebrowsr”. “But what does that picture mean?” I hear this reaction frequently when I show people maps I have made of social media connections. I often point out that the map and the data can reveal people who occupy important locations in [...]

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This is the collection of keyword pairs that appeared in two clusters of people who Tweeted about “Paul Ryan”, the Republican Congressman from Wisconsin who delivered the GOP rebuttal to the 2011 United States State of the Union Address.  This network illustrates the ways that certain word pairs appears only or predominantly in one cluster (colored [...]

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Curved edges have arrived in NodeXL (v. 174). Here is a network visualization with all the edges drawn as straight lines: The same network graph can be drawn with slightly curved edges: The result is a slight improvement in readability. To start, the edges curve just a bit.  Soon, we will allow user control over [...]

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Every network visualization should have a legend that explains what the colors, edge widths, and filters are that define the network graph. NodeXL automatically generates a network legend and displays it when the Graph Elements menu is opened: And the “Legend” option is selected. This will place a legend at the bottom of the visualization [...]

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The NodeXL team at the Social Media Research Foundation is happy to announce the availability of the newest version: there is lots of new stuff in the latest release of NodeXL v.1.0.1.167! Group Frames: If your graph has groups and you choose to lay out the groups in their own boxes (NodeXL, Graph, Layout, Layout [...]

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NodeXL now (v.166) offers users a set of keyboard shortcuts that can speed up your routine network layout tasks. After you click in the graph pane, a number of keyboard shortcuts are now available for functions that had previously been available in the visualization pane’s right-click menu. Now, you can press: Ctrl+A to select all [...]

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Once you start creating and collecting network graphs you may find you can build a significant collection: hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of graphs may result from a study or on-going monitoring project. In a series of features in the NodeXL project we have enabled a workflow for constructing many social media  network graphs [...]

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In many cases I look at a network graph and apply a series of operations to transform it into a more presentable form.  For example, I often calculate graph metrics, use Autofill columns to map data to display attributes like size, color, or shape, create clusters, sub-graph images, and then select the Harel-Koren layout and [...]

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Clusters are now groups in NodeXL. Recently, the NodeXL team has been focused on a set of new features related to grouping sets of vertices together.  In the previous version we released a feature that allowed all sorts of groupings to be recorded in the worksheet.  What’s new is that the three clustering algorithms we [...]

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The NodeXL team has just released a new version (v.1.0.1.128) that contains a new “Automation” feature that allows users to define a collection of operations to perform on their network graphs and invoke the complete set in a single button click AND reuse that configuration on other workbook graphs.  In fact, the feature will apply [...]

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From this:to this:  in just a few clicks. Many network graphs contain disconnected smaller graphs, called “components”, within them. Most layout algorithms do a poor job of managing to group each component in a separate space. Instead, often, components are laid over one another, suggesting connections that are not real. A simple solution we have [...]

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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 [...]

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