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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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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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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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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There are hundreds of conferences sponsored by the ACM on almost every topic related to computing.  In some cases the same person will publish a paper in more than one conference, creating a tie between them.  Below is a network map application that displays a collection of ACM conferences connected by this authorship tie: [...]

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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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This is a brief demo video about NodeXL analyzing Twitter social network connections among a group of users who all mentioned the term “digg”.

2009 – November – NodeXL – Demo – Mapping Twitter Social Networks “Digg” from Marc Smith on Vimeo.
This is a good demonstration of several features in NodeXL: social media network importers (in [...]

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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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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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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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New menu items have been added to NodeXL in the v.85 release made available today!
These “Visual Properties” features are part of a larger set of work items intended to make it easier to manipulate and decorate a network graph in Excel.
NodeXL recently crossed 8,000 downloads! Thanks to everyone for the interest and support for [...]

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We recently released version 76 of NodeXL that opened up the network metrics to developers through an API.
It the most recent release (v.78) we have improved on the graphical display layer used in NodeXL.  Earlier, we had been using GDI+, the basic drawing features of Windows.  Today, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is used in place [...]

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Here is a slide deck that describes major features of the NodeXL add-in for Excel 2007:
2009 Node XL Overview: Social Network Analysis in Excel 2007
View more presentations from Marc Smith.

 
More documentation is in the works.  Please post questions to the Codeplex discussion board!

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Here is a good example of an application of Bernie Hogan’s Facebook edgelist extractor. Alan Shussman used it on his own Facebook account and generated the following image:
Alan used the NetworkX tool and python to build this image of his sub-groups in Facebook.
It does work nicely to highlight the life-stage clusters of relationships that [...]

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Jordi Comas at Bucknell University just mentioned this cool application on the SOCNET social network analysis discussion email list and I think it is worth a repeat: here is a great game that challenges you to find arrangements of nodes to minimize all edge crossings.
http://www.aeriagames.com/games/mini/puzzle/4467/Untangle_1.2
Not a bad way to spend a few moments appreciating the [...]

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