Connected Action

  The recent Strata Conference in New York City gathered many leaders in big data, data mining, and information visualization. Link: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6203313170 Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Strata when queried on September 20, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow [...]

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HealthTap is a website that connects people with medical questions to health providers with answers. This is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word HealthTap when queried on September 28, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one [...]

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Luka Potkonjak has contributed a new feature to NodeXL: edge bundling.  Following on the heels of the release of curved edges in version. 175, we now provide a way to gather parallel edges together into “bundles” that travel together until they diverge close to their destinations. The effect is visually striking.  Here is a before [...]

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NodeXL is extendable.  3rd Party developers have been building data providers that can plug into NodeXL that connect the network visualization tool to sources of network data.  We now have three providers of extensions to NodeXL: VOSON for WWW hyperlink networks, the Exchange Spigot for NodeXL for extracting enterprise email networks, and the Facebook Spigot [...]

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Here is a nice way to display high resolution network maps: zoom.it! This is a map of the connections among the people who tweeted the terms “FOCAS11″ or “Aspen Institute” on August 2, 2011. Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Aspeninstitute OR FOCAS11 when queried on August 2, 2011, scaled by [...]

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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 Royal Wedding is a topic of great interest around the world. This is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the words #rw2011 when queried on April 28, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded), connected by replying, mentioning and following. Layout using the “Group Layout” composed [...]

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NodeXL allows users to gather vertices into named collections called “Groups”.  This is handy whenever the entities in the network are made up of different types or an algorithm has divided the network into sub-regions based on how densely some vertices connect to one another.  The Groups menu is found in the NodeXL>Analysis menu: Since version [...]

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http://www.ischools.org/iConference11/2011index/ Our paper, Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia,  about the variety of  roles people perform in Wikis received the best paper award (along with 4 others) in a field of 86 papers.   The 2011 iConference accepted 86 papers, and had about 550 attendees. The paper is authored by: Howard T. Welser at Ohio University, [...]

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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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I gave a talk at the Personal Digital Archives conference held at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, California on 24 February 2011.  The videos of the talks at the event are now available from the Internet Archive web site. Here is a NodeXL map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term PDA2011 OR PDA11: [...]

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Here is a recipe for finding and building collections of influential Twitter users relevant to your goal and message. A common question related to social media that I am often asked is: “how do we grow our twitter followers?”  I try to re-frame that question as “how can we get our message viewed by the [...]

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A recent paper “EventGraphs: Charting Collections of Conference Connections” by Marc Smith from Connected Action, Professor Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) and Professor Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) both from the University of Maryland and has been accepted for publication at the 2011 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Conference.  This is the 44th year for the conference. [...]

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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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As mobile devices become a major method for authoring and consuming social media, location data is increasingly a part of many posts, tweets, check-ins, and messages.  Many Twitter clients, for example, can add the user’s current latitude and longitude to the metadata associated with a tweet.  Other systems like Facebook Places, Google Latitude and Foursquare [...]

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