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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Time for another NodeXL update: sparklines!  Sparklines are a nifty and compact way of displaying a line chart in a small area.
Setting dynamic filters in NodeXL has been somewhat like rummaging around in the dark: without a way to see the distribution beneath a filter the user only knows the max and min values, not [...]

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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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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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NodeXL has updated again (v.1.0.1.109) with new network metrics.  The application now calculates path length data for your network, reporting the Maximum Geodesic Distance and the Average Geodesic Distance.  The list of overall metrics NodeXL creates includes: Vertices (the number of nodes in the graph), Unique Edges, Edges With Duplicates, Total Edges, Self-Loops (Edges that point back at the node [...]

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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 but [...]

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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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Here is a recent slidedeck that provides an overview of NodeXL and social media network analysis.
2009 December NodeXL Overview
View more presentations from Marc Smith.

The deck illustrates the use of NodeXL to extract several social media networks from systems like twitter and facebook to generate maps of communities and identify people and objects in key locations.

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NodeXL has had a rudimentary flickr tag network data spigot for some time but we have just added a number of features to this data importer that makes it much more useful.
You can now select the number of network levels to include, an optional sample image file can be included for each tag, and the [...]

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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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On December 15th in Mountain View, California join me for lunch and a workshop on creating social media network diagrams!  We will provide a hands-on guide to creating maps of the collections of connections among people who tweet about various brands, topics, events, and concepts. Bring your own Windows/Office 2007 machine and we will set you [...]

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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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Version 95 of NodeXL is hot off the compiler and we are pleased to announce several major features that create a social media network analysis dashboard.  From the NodeXL interface it is now possible to import networks from twitter, flickr, email, and a range of social network file formats.  Coming soon: support for more spigots [...]

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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 colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel.
The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for the [...]

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