The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA).

This year’s INSNA “Sunbelt” conference is at the  Riva del Garda Fierecongressi, Trento, Italy!  Here is the 2010 INSNA Sunbelt Program.

This is the NodeXL map of connections among people who tweeted the hashtag used for the conference “#sunbelt”.

Having now seen several of these maps for other topics and events (see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/) this map can be placed in context.  It is a small group, but has a high density of connections.  It lacks isolates, the people who say the term but do not connect to others who say that term.  This means that this is a very “in-group” population: if you know to use the #sunbelt hashtag, you probably connect to someone else who uses the term.  It is a single major cluster of connected people, no obvious sub-graphs or clusters are visible.  Not everyone is central in the graph, and those who are have a prominent role in the network science community.  Here is the top ten list of #sunbelt mentioning twitter users ranked by betweeness centrality.

miriamnotten
barrywellman
memeticbrand
isidromj
drewconway
gephi
kristtina
danevans87
valdiskrebs
ciro

Carter Butts delivered a talk about “simple things” that govern the structure of social networks like the limited number of configurations networks can take when the number of nodes is lower than, say, 15.

Phil Bonacich also delivered a keynote address which focused on the role of power in social relationships and the ways that network configurations confer more or less power on particular locations within the network.  People with choices among their interaction partners are able to resist exploitation better than those with few or no choices.

Network researcher Valdis Krebs and Sociologist Barry Wellman attended (that’s me in the middle!).

Sociologist Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute and John Kelly from Morningside Analytics were in attendance.

March 10-14, 2009 is the INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysts) “Sunbelt” conference in San Diego (http://insna.org/).

On Wednesday, March 11th 8:30am – noon I will present a workshop on:

Using NodeXL for Social Network Analysis (Excel)

NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet. Adding the directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties. In this tutorial the steps needed to install and operate NodeXL are reviewed. The NodeXL add-in provides directed graph charting features within Excel, allowing users to create node-link diagrams with control over each node and edge color, size, transparency and shape. Since NodeXL builds within Excel, all of the controls and programmatic features of Office are available. Additional features of NodeXL generate social networks from data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine). Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. This session will provide a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL. Attendees are encouraged to bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets will be provided. To download the NodeXL Add-in and slides, go to: http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl

Along with Professor Derek Hansen, from the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies, I will run a similar workshop at the Communities and Technologies 2009 Conference on June 24th at Penn State.