I will speak this March 4th at the 2012 Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco about ” Crowd Photography for Social Media“.

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012/speakers.php
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012/agenda.php#

Monday @ 5:25-5:45pm

Track 1:
Social Data Case Study:
Social Media Research Foundation
Crowd Photography for Social Media

Crowds of people gather in social media around many products, services, businesses, and events but they can be difficult to see and understand. With new free and open tools, it is now possible to map and measure social media spaces, capturing the sub-groups and key people within and between them. Learn how to capture social media data and quickly generate a visual map of the crowd. With maps in hand, we will discuss ways they guide a journey to the key influencers and concepts in the crowd.

Speaker: Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

Mapping social media networks (with no coding) using NodeXL

Time: 16:50 on 01 Mar 2012.

Session type: 40 minute presentation

Topics: Visualization & Interface

Description: Maps of the complex connections that form when people link, like, reply, rate, review, favorite, friend, follow, edit, and mention one another can reveal important trends. It is possible to create network maps with free and open tools that identify key people and sub-groups in any social media population with just a few key clicks. Can you make a pie chart? You can now make a network chart.

Abstract: Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation’s (http://www.smrfoundation.org) free and open NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, Networks become as easy to create as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and email networks will be presented.

We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.

I will present a talk at Personal Digital Archiving 2012 titled “Arc-chiving: saving social links for study“.

The conference will be held on Thursday-Friday, February 23-24, 2012 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

News and updates on the conference will be posted at the conference web site, http://personalarchiving.com.

My talk this year will focus on collecting and analyzing connections between digital objects (like users) and the insights these tools make possible.

Abstract: While digital content is archived in various ways, the “arcs” or links among people and their digital objects are not systematically saved. Efforts to store social media often overlooks including data about collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship related to social media. It is producing tools that can collect, analyze and upload social media data, including the arcs that link people and objects. Using the free and open NodeXL application, users can collect, analyze and visualize complex networks and then upload the data to a growing archive on the web at NodeXLGraphGallery.org. As the group of researchers grows, an archive is being assembled to provide researchers around the world with the data about social media needed to understand the ways computer mediated communication tools shape society.

My talk at the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving conference is available through the Internet Archive’s video service:

I will speak at the International Symposium on Convergence Technology (ConTech 2011) – Smart & Humane World – on November 3rd in Seoul, South Korea.

Date: 2011 November 3 (Thurs)
Place: COEX Grand Ballroom, Seoul, Korea
Organized by Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technologies (AICT), Seoul National University (SNU)
In Cooperation with Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, National Research Foundation of Korea, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology (GSCST)
Symposium Chair : Choi, Yanghee (President, AICT)

Program
09:00~09:30 Registration
09:30~10:00 Opening Ceremony
Plenary Session : Smart & Humane World through Convergence
10:00~10:40 Speaker (TBD)
10:50~11:30 Speaker (TBD)
11:30~13:00 Lunch
Session 1 : Bio Convergence (Chair : Prof. Kim, Sunghoon)
Session 2 : IT Convergence (Chair : Dr. Lee, Manjai)
Session 3 : Appropriate Technology (Chair : Prof. Kang, Namjun)
13:00~15:00 Scott A. Strobel (Professor, Yale University)
Speaker Kevin Kim (Professor, University of Illinois)
Speaker Masaru Kitsuregawa (Professor, Tokyo University)
Speaker Haesun Park (Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Speaker Marc Smith (Connected Action)
Speaker Sang-goo Lee (Professor, Seoul National University)
Speaker Haklae Kim (Samsung)
Speaker Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo)

My slides: 20111103 con tech2011-marc smith

I will also visit Professor Han Woo Park at YeungNam University (Wikipedia) in Daegu, South Korea to meet with his students in the Webometrics Institute program.

This will be my second trip to Korea, I was there last year for a related event.  Pictures after the jump:

I presented on social media network analysis on October 20, 2011 in New York City at Predictive Analytics World.

A map of the connections among the people tweeting about the #Pawcon hashtag is below.

Network Maps for End Users: Collect, Analyze, Visualize and Communicate Network Insights with Zero Coding

Abstract: Networks are everywhere except the end user desktop.  NodeXL, the free and open network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for the popular and familiar Excel (2007/2010) spreadsheet allows users who are comfortable making pie charts to now make useful network visualizations.  Developed and released by the Social Media Research Foundation, NodeXL uses Excel as a framework, providing a GUI network browser (a “web browser”?) that novices can use quickly and experts can use to generate sophisticated results.  Data importers provide access to a range of social media network data sources like Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Facebook, email, the WWW, and more through standard file formats (CSV, GraphML, Matrix).  Simple to use tools can automatically analyze, visualize and highlight insights in complex network graphs.  Using NodeXL, researchers have been collecting a wide range of network data sets from various social media services.  These images reveal a range of common social formations in social media and point to people who occupy strategic locations in these graphs.

This is a map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term “PAWCON” on the first day of the event:

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word #pawcon when queried on October 19, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6261006732/sizes/l/in/ph…

Top most between users:
@tapan_patel
@pawcon
@sasanalytics
@deloitteba
@kristinevick
@jamet123
@zementis
@kdnuggets
@tibcospotfire
@saspublishing

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 41
Unique Edges: 233
Edges With Duplicates: 120
Total Edges: 353
Self-Loops: 44
Connected Components: 2
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 1
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 40
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 352
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 4
Average Geodesic Distance: 1.87133
Graph Density: 0.15304878
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

Here is an example map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term “pawcon” in Twitter on September 14th, a week prior to the event.

Manu Sharma, Principle Research Scientist at LinkedIn gave a great presentation on the patterns found in their data.  Big data, for example, showed that most of the people who previously worked at recently failed banks and financial institutions have updated their profiles to show that they mostly have new jobs at some of the remaining companies in the industry.

The event was held at the New York Hilton: Maps & Directions

I have enjoyed and been educated by my previous visits to South Africa and the Mobile Web in Africa conference, now in its 3rd year.

MWA gathers the many parts of the picture of mobile technologies in play across the African continent.

I will speak again at this year’s event, focusing on social media networks.  My partner is Walter Pike, a marketing professional with a specialty in digital media.

Here is the agenda for the workshop on Friday, November 25th.

Photos from the prior two years of Mobile Web Africa after the jump:

2010

2009

I will speak at Purdue University on September 22 and 23, 2011 about mapping social media networks.

My host is Sorin Matei, professor of Communications, who has been researching the social structure of social media networks.

I will also speak at Professor Matei’s class: COM 63200 On-line Interaction and Facilitation

Here is an example map of the connections among the people who tweeted the word “Purdue” on September 16th, 2011:

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Purdue when queried on September 16, 2011, scaled by numbers of tweets (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: www.purdue.edu/

Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.

(Edges connecting users are bundled and curved with recent features added to NodeXL v.177.)

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6155750905/sizes/o/in/ph…

Betweenness Centrality is defined here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm is defined here: pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i6/e066111

Top most between users:
@lifeatpurdue
@jajuanjohnson
@stfu_gabby
@purdueexponent
@charliienosheen
@mbrister2
@boilerfootball
@purduesports
@hipandresanbo
@cheesebrrrrr

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 4045
Edges With Duplicates: 706
Total Edges: 4751
Self-Loops: 977
Connected Components: 429
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 395
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 528
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4134
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 12
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.517707
Graph Density: 0.003507508
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.177

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.

 

Please vote on our SxSW 2012 panel:

Thanks for your vote for our SxSW panel!

I will be speaking at the Oxford Internet Institute on July 13 and 14, 2011 as part of the Summer Doctoral Program.

I will speak about the use of social network analysis and visualization techniques to analyze and understand social media.

The Summer Doctoral Program is designed to

…bring together advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research relating to the Internet and other ICTs. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their thesis research and create a peer network of excellent young researchers.

The 2011 Summer Doctoral Programme will draw substantially upon the OII’s research strengths and will involve participation from many of our faculty, together with colleagues from other partner institutions. It will emphasise methodological innovation and good practice in research design, and will expose students to the benefits of discussing their research in a multi-disciplinary teaching environment.”

I will be speaking at the Jacob T. Schwartz International School for Scientific Research week long Lipari School on Computational Social Science , July 17 – July 23, 2011, Lipari Island, Italy.

This year’s program is dedicated to Computational Social Science: Text and Decisions

Speakers:

• Claudio Cioffi-Revilla: Director of the Center for Social Complexity, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, Washington DC.
• Huan Liu: Community Detection and Mining in Social Media [abstract]
  School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University
• Roel Popping: Computer-assisted text analysis, and the relevance of decision making and text mining [abstract]
  Department of Sociology, University of Groningen

Tutorials

• Marc A. Smith: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Maps and Measures with NodeXL [abstract]
  Chief Social Scientist, Connected Action Consulting Group
• Calogero Zarba: Introduction to matrix algebra [abstract]
  Neodata Intelligence s.r.l., Italy
• Alessandro Pluchino: Netlogo: An agent based simulation programmable environment [abstract], University of Catania, Italy

Here is a NodeXL map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term PDA2011 OR PDA11:

The top most between people in this graph were: @anarchivist, @blefurgy, @naypinya, @rodanda, @jeffubois, @scottros, @evancaroll, @kevinmarks, @vurayav, and @sshreeves.

Here is the video from my talk:

I will be speaking at the next Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco– March 14-15, 2011 about measuring and mapping social media networks with NodeXL:

Social Data: Advanced Methods – Social (Media) Network Analysis with NodeXL
www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2011/agenda.php#day2-13a

Networks are the common data structure that unify the otherwise diverse range of social media services. In this session learn how to extract social networks from various social media systems and analyze and visualize the structures found in collections of connections. Learn to use the free and open NodeXL add-in for Excel 2007/2010 to analyze email, twitter, facebook, youtube, www, flickr, and wiki networks.

Here is an example – a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the string “#pawcon”.

Connections among the Twitter users who recently mentioned PAWCON when queried on March 14, 2011 including tweets from the period 3/10/2011 15:13 to 3/15/2011 3:51, scaled by numbers of followers.
NodeXL is available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

The top most between contributors were: @tapan_patel, @jamet123, @zementis, @pawcon, @ibmspss, @sasanalytics, @kristinevick, @waynettetubbs, @dataspora, @inside_r

On 11 March 2011, I will be speaking at:

Organizational and Social Media Network Analysis:
Next Practices in Organizational Networks, Analytics and Media

Along with Valdis Krebs, Chief Scientist, http://thenetworkthinkers.com/

Valdis will be speaking about Organizational Network Analysis - Introduction to Enterprise Networks, followed by a InFlow 3.1 Workshop: Social Network Analysis with InFlow 3.1

I will be speaking about Social Media Network Analysis with NodeXL.

Preservation Park
1233 Preservation Park Way
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 874-7580
(click for map)

Tell a Friend
Add to Calendar

Institute for Communication Technology Management

http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/centers/ctm/events

On March 10th, 2011 I will speak on a panel at the USC Marshall School of Business Institute for Communication Technology Management Executive Roundtable.

]]> http://www.connectedaction.net/2011/03/05/10-march-2011-usc-marshall-school-of-business-communication-technology-executive-roundtable/feed/ 0 http://www.connectedaction.net/2010/11/06/november-8-2010-seoul-korea-3rd-international-conference-on-digital-culture/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=november-8-2010-seoul-korea-3rd-international-conference-on-digital-culture http://www.connectedaction.net/2010/11/06/november-8-2010-seoul-korea-3rd-international-conference-on-digital-culture/#comments Sat, 06 Nov 2010 23:56:12 +0000 Marc Smith http://www.connectedaction.net/?p=3726

On November 8th, 2010 I spoke in Seoul, Korea at the 3rd International Conference on Digital Culture on the topic of “Smart Society and Civic Culture“.

Several of my colleagues also spoke at the event, including Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, Han Woo Park from YeoungNam University, Korea, George Barnett from the University of California, Davis and Robert Ackland from The Australian National University, AU.

Robert Ackland from The Australian National University, AU

George Barnett from the University of California, Davis

Han Woo Park from YeoungNam University, Korea

Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki from the University of Tsukuba, Japan

Marc Smith, Connected Action Consulting Group

Han Woo Park‘s research team from YeoungNam University, Korea

I spoke at the Social Tech 2010 conference in San Jose on October 26, 2010.

The event focused on social media technologies and practices in the business to business space.

I spoke on a panel about the application of social network analysis to social media to illustrate the ways SNA can illuminate the shape and key contributors to a social media crowd inside the firewall or on the public Internet.

Other notable speakers included: Thomas Lento from Facebook, Lawrence Liu from Cisco and Michael Wu from Lithium.  The panel was moderated by Tatyana Kanzaveli.

An example of applying social network analysis and visualization is this map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted “socialtech” on the 25th of September, 2010.

The top most between users in this map can be sorted in the spreadsheet, bringing the user accounts for @mprofsevents, @socialtech, @mikewise07, @jowyang, @marketingprofs, @meganleap, @socialmediaclub, @cotweet, @zuberance, @spiral16.

I spoke at the University of Michigan, School of Information on October 19th, 2010 about “Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Mapping and Measuring Social Media Networks to Find Key Positions and Structures“.

I demonstrated the ways social network data sets can be extracted from social media services like Facebook, Twitter, email, YouTube, and flickr.  These network graphs can reveal information about the “shape” of the population in terms of the presence of sub-groups and communities within the larger population.  In addition, each individual participant is located or positioned within the graph, helping to identify the people who are “core” versus those who are peripheral, as well as those who occupy the position of “bridge” between two otherwise separate groups.

Yahoo! Speaker Series

The Yahoo Speaker Series at the School of Information supports distinguished guest lecturers from the fields of information and technology.

2010 Speaker: Marc Smith
VIDEO: Marc Smith

Marc Smith, chief social scientist with the Connected Action Social Group, presented “Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Mapping and Measuring Social Media Networks to Find Key Positions and Structures,” on Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010.

Smith’s talk was sponsored by the Yahoo! Speaker Series, Michigan Interactive & Social Computing, and the School of Information.

In this talk, Smith described how networks are a data structure common across all social media systems — systems defined by enabling populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation‘s NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. Using NodeXL, networks become as easy to create and analyze as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and e-mail networks will be presented, illustrating different patterns created when communities, brands, and controversies are discussed.

I returned to South Africa to attend the 2010 edition of Mobile Web Africa, a conference focused on the remarkable adoption and development of mobile networks and technology in Africa.

The conference took place on 29th & 30th September 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I presented a workshop on social media network analysis, see: http://www.mobilewebafrica.com/marc-smith-workshop.php

The conference twitter hashtag #MWA2010 received a significant amount of traffic.  I mapped the collection of collections formed when people who tweeted “#MWA2010″ also followed, replied, or mentioned one another.  The following two EventMaps of the #MWA2010 twitter hashtag illustrates the development of the network.

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on October 5th, 2010

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on September 29th, 2010

The later graph is defined by three leading contributors who each generated significant retweeting along with mentions and replies.

I attended the previous 2009 Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, organized by AllAmber Media which also featured a focus on the next wave of mobile devices and services.

Mobile is BIG in Africa.  The “Remote control of the Universe” = Mobile Phone.

The speaker from Samsung last year noted that for many Africans, the mobile device is their first and main method for managing digital objects.  A phone is not just a phone, it is a still and video camera, music player, watch, web browser, flashlight, wallet and file system.

The representative from Yonder Mobile Media noted that mobile phones have now exceeded the installed base of the previously most widely used communication technology: FM Radio.  But mobile is different from FM: mobile devices are two way, provide a method for exchanging payments, and are a primary method of access to the internet for many billions of people.  Mobile is the “first” screen for many people in Africa, not the third screen role that it plays in more developed economies.  Regional services like MXIT and The Grid are offering Internet services tailored to affordable mobile devices.

Photos from this year’s event:

Photos from last year’s event:

Photos from Cape Town:

2010 - Sept - UC Davis CTSA SNA Community Engagement

CTSA Community Engagement and Social Network Analysis Workshop
September 22-24, 2010
University of California Davis
Clinical and Translational Science Center
Sacramento, California

OBJECTIVES

• Understand the basic concepts, tools, and techniques of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and how they relate to the evaluation of CTSAs and their impact on community research networks.
• Have sufficient exposure to a basic software tool for inputting and analyzing network data in order to undertake a simple social network analysis.
• Enumerate some possible uses of SNA and how to develop data collection tools or use existing sources to study the process and impact of CTSA on community engaged research.
• List primary authors of SNA analyses relevant to CTSA and community engaged research.

Presentation by Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University

10:30-Noon Demonstration of NodeXL Software

Marc Smith.

NodeXL is a free and open add-in for Excel that supports network overview, discovery and exploration. A contributor to NodeXL will provide basic instruction in its use, how to generate useful network statistics and metrics, how to create visualizations of network graphs and how to filter and display attributes that can be used to highlight important structures in networks.

1:00-1:45 Using NodeXL

Joe Hunt, MPH, Indiana University (with Marc Smith)

Using NodeXL to visualize interactions between investigators and CTSA key functions.

Mapping mobile social networks with NodeXL: finding key users, groups, and locations

The video is now available:

The video reviews the creation of maps like this:

That illustrate the connections among people who tweet the term “#ecomm2010″, scaled by the number of followers.

Abstract: Social network analysis (SNA) is a powerful method for gaining insight into the massive collections of connections created when many people connect to one another through mobile devices. SNA has been widely applied to desktop social media and is moving into the mobile world. Prominent studies of the “call graph” have been produced at national scales.

Mobile providers are applying SNA to identify key subscribers who can reduce churn and help gain adoption of new services and products. Network analysis has historically had a steep learning curve, but now new tools are making SNA easier for less technical users. This talk will describe social network concepts and their application to mobile data sets. A free and open add-in for the popular Excel 2007 spreadsheet called NodeXL (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) can perform many complex SNA tasks like data import, scrubbing, metrics calculation, clustering, and visualization. Applying this tool to call graph and subscriber data sets can reveal key positions in the network that can attract and hold other subscribers in the system.

Examples of network analysis of social media and mobile data sets can be found on the Connected Action blog (http://www.connectedaction.net).

Ben Shneiderman: Methods and Tools for Facilitating Social Participation from User Experience Israel (UXI) on Vimeo.

Nice review of information visualization techniques and some mention of recent work on the NodeXL project.

On May 21st, I will speak at the Social Graph Symposium in Mountain View, California along with Sharad Goel – Research Scientist at Yahoo and DJ Patil – Chief Scientist at LinkedIn.

The Social Graph Symposium brings together academics, experts, influencers, executives, and other prominent figures with an interest in social graphs. The event is centered around the social graph and its implications for business, technology, and the community.

Discussions this year will center around:

• State of the Social Graph
• Latest Social Graph Research
• Activism
• Advertising
• Influencer and Word-of-Mouth Marketing
• Marketing
• Retail
• Search
• Social Gaming

Here is a map of recent connections among  twitter users who mention the term “Social Graph”:

I will be speaking at the Princeton Club of Northern California on May 12, 2010.

Along with my colleague Eduarda Mendes-Rodriguez I will be speaking at the University of Porto next Friday, March 26th.

Hands-on Workshop – Social Media Network Analysis in NodeXL

This workshop provides an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and its application to social media. The network or directed graph is a common structure in a wide range of different kinds of social media. Social Network Analysis is a set of tools, concepts, and techniques that can help measure a graph and the location and connection pattern of each component part.

Using NodeXL, workshop participants will learn how to take data from common social media sources (including enterprise discussions and online communities, Twitter, Flickr, your own email) and perform various types of analysis. Through this workshop, participants will:

· be able to understand the basics of SNA, its terminology and background.
· be able to transform communication data (e.g. Twitter, email, Flickr, message boards etc.) into network data.
· understand the different possible presentations of social networks, e.g. in a matrix or a sociogram.
· apply network metrics and visualizations to find clusters and key contributors in real world social media data.
· get familiar with the use of standard SNA tools and software in general and the NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel in particular.
· be able to derive practical and useful information through SNA analysis that would help design an innovative and successful online community.

I will attend and speak at a symposium being heldMarch 24-25, 2010 at the IE University Department of Communication in Segovia, Spain.  The topic is: Transnational connections: Challenges and opportunities for communication.

“The Symposium aims to generate discussion on cutting-edge ideas in political communication, encourage international cooperation and unite scholars and practitioners.”

The symposium is organized with Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Organizer and founding Dean of IE School of Communication, Samuel Martín-Barbero notes that the event will gather:

“More than forty international panelists, moderators and speakers (who) will not only reflect on the state of the field, but will also discuss cutting-edge advances in theory, research and practice.”

I will attend along with my colleague John Kelly, from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University and Founder of Morningside Analytics.

Here is the Program, a link to the Registration, and the Twitter stream for the conference.

I will speak about “Analyzing Internet social media: visualizing the social networks in computer networks”:

Social media systems on the Internet are sociologically interesting: why do some online groups succeed where others fail?  How do different collections of online media and populations of authors differ from one another?  How do patterns of contribution vary and how do these differences illustrate the roles people play within their communities?  Several visualizations of patterns of contribution and connection in a range of Internet social media including web boards, enterprise social networks services, and personal email are presented to illustrate the range of variation among social media repositories and between types of contributors.  These images suggest that a more comprehensive overview of social media can generate sociologically relevant findings, improve community management tasks as well as provide features that can improve search and ranking of user generated content.  A freely available tool, NodeXL, will be demonstrated to perform basic social media analysis tasks.  Extending these tools to include mobile social software (“mososo”) data sets is a major new direction.   In the not too distant future, mobile devices will possess a range of sensors and become  more “socially aware”.  When phones routinely notice each other the nature of social interaction will change dramatically.  How will places and  locations change when machines become socially aware?  In this talk, sociologist Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Connected Action Consulting Group, a provider of social media analysis platforms and services, will describe these new technologies and some ways of thinking about their implications.

Photos:

The Annual Meeting of the Israel Internet Association (http://www.isoc.org.il (English)) was held February 22-23 2010. I spoke at this year’s meeting: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2010/agenda.php?lang=en

Part 1

Part 2

The previous year’s conference website is at: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2009/program.php

The Israel Internet Association is the official Israeli Chapter of the Internet Society.  Their annual meeting is a central event of academics (sociologists, psychologists, business and law) as well as industry participants from sectors including mobile cellular companies and internet service suppliers.

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 research.

Wednesday, February 24^th, 1 pm

IBM Building
Haifa University

Title: Visualizing collections of social media connections: using social network analysis to assess, evaluate and measure social media engagement

Abstract: Social networks are created whenever people interact.  These networks become more visible when interactions take place through social media.  Social networks form when people link, reply, comment, edit, tag, and friend one another.  Sub-populations are formed whenever people mention the same company, products, event, topic, or personality.  Using social network analysis on collections of social media connections reveals important patterns: how are people clustered and grouped, where are the gaps, who plays the roles of bridge, hub, and isolate? In this talk I will display maps of twitter, you tube, flickr, and enterprise email systems and demonstrate several tools that can be used to collect, analyze, map and monitor social media, including the free and open NodeXL (network overview, discovery and exploration) add-in Excel 2007.

Here, for example, is a map of the connections among people who recently mentioned “haifa” in twitter sized by number of followers:

Some photos taken during the trip are available after the jump:

Saving Our Present for the Future: Personal Archiving 2010

From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial information, vital personal records are becoming digital. At the same time, creation and capture of new digital information has become a part of the daily routine for hundreds of millions of people. But what are the long term prospects for this data?

The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones will be sold in 2010) with the move from older forms of media is reshaping both our personal and collective memories. The size and complexity of personal collections growing, these collections are spread across different media (including film and paper!), and the lines between personal and professional, published and unpublished are being redrawn.

Whether these issues are described as personal archiving, lifestreams, personal digital heritage, preserving digital lives, scrapbooking, or managing intellectual estates, they present major challenges for both individuals and institutions: data loss is a nearly universal experience, whether it is due to hardware failure, obsolescence, user error, lack of institutional support, or any one of many other reasons. Some of these losses may not matter; but the early work  of the Nobel prize winners of the 2030s is likely to be digital today, and therefore at risk in ways that previous scientific and literary creations were not. And it isn’t just Nobel winners that matter: the lives of all of us will be preserved in ways not previously possible.

On Tuesday, February 16, the Internet Archive will host a small conference for practitioners in personal digital archiving.

The morning sessions will be devoted to examples of current practice; the afternoon discussion will focus on developing recommendations for institutions and individuals, and on developing a research agenda. Among the questions we would like to discuss:

- What new social norms around preservation, access, and disclosure are emerging?
- How can we cope with the shift from simple (e.g. text) to rich media (e.g. moving images) in personal collections?
- What is the gap between current possibilities for preserving personal collections, and what is actually needed by both individuals and institutions?
- What tools and services are needed to better enable self-archiving?
- What new economic models to support personal archives may be evolve?
- What are the long term rights management issues? Are there unrecognized stakeholders we should begin to account for now?
- Can we better anticipate (and measure) losses of personal material?
- Do libraries, museums, and archives have a new responsibility to collect personal materials?
- What has already failed? Can we generalize about approaches that are likely to fail over time?
- What are the options for cultural heritage institutions — libraries, museums, and archives — that want to preserve the personal collections of citizens and scholars, creators and actors?
- What might be the risks of building archiving systems that are “too good” or overly applied?

For individuals, institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, and funding agencies thinking about how best to address these issues, this meeting will include a variety of examples that may be replicated, and will sharpen the questions (technical, social, economic) around personal archiving.

For further information, please contact Jeff Ubois (jeff@ubois.com).

We  discussed ways to leverage social networks  networks beyond personal connections – to provide business value.  We talked about ways to efficiently and effectively use social media to market and grow your business.

Using social media to grow and market your business

I spoke about tools, like NodeXL, that we have been building that create maps of the relationships among a population of people gathered by some shared attribute, like mentioning a keyword or hashtag.

Here are a few excerpts from the event created by Tendo Communications:

After visiting the Oxford Internet Institute on December 4th, I will be visiting Aachen University to talk about social media network analysis this December 7th and 8th.

I will be visiting with my hosts, Zinayida Petrushyna and Ralf Klamma who have been doing insightful work exploring social media sites like Media Wikis and Wikipedia.  The Wiki Watcher project is a big favorite of mine.  Their working group on Social Network Analysis on Dynamic Digital Networks is of particular interest.

While I am back in Aachen, I hope I will get to see some of the folks I met at the “European Microsoft Innovation Center” (EMIC) located there.  They focus on research into embedded systems which I see as having vast implications for the ways computers sense social relationships.  When sociologically aware machines are widely used, we will have new ways of building and maintaining relationships.

I will give three presentations over two days in Aachen – I hope you can attend if you are in the area!

Monday, December 7, 2009 (in cooperation with the Web Science II course at RWTH Aachen University):

12:15 – 13:45 Social Media Visualization Analysis: overview of work to visualize social media using treemaps, histograms, scatterplots and social network diagrams

Using social media makes evidence of social relationships into machine readable data streams.  The resulting data sets contain time series, hierarchy, and network data structures that can be visualized to illustrate the range of variation in social media data spaces and participants.  Histograms, line charts, treemaps, and network diagrams can be used in concert to illuminate the many facets of behavior and population present in social media spaces.  Resulting images illustrate the range of variation of individual and collective formations in social media spaces.

16:00 – 17:30 NodeXL – A hands-on guide: a workshop style review of sample data sets that are processed through NodeXL operations to generate metrics and a visualization that tells a story.

As social media networks proliferate there is a growing need for tools to manage, analyze, and visualize network graphs.  NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet application. Adding the directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties. In this workshop the steps needed to install and productively operate NodeXL for Office 2007 are reviewed. The free and open 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 without requiring the use of a command line interface or programming language. Since NodeXL builds within Excel, all of the controls and programmatic features of Office are available. Additional features of NodeXL generate social networks from social media data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system. 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.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

10:00 – 11:00 In the future my phone will notice your phone: from ephemeral to archival societies

New sources of data from everyday life are being captured and recorded with mobile devices, creating a new stream of archival material that is richer than all but the most obsessively observed biographies. Many organizations are adopting social media and creating data sets that map their internal social network structure as an accidental by-product.  Studying these data is sets is a focus of growing interest. Research projects like SenseCam are now becoming products and services like nTag, Spotme, Fire Eagle, and Google Lattitude using devices like iPhone and G1 are weaving location into every application.   When my phone notices your phone a new set of mobile social software applications become possible that capture data about other people as they beacon their identifies to one another. Additional sensors will collect medical data to improve our health and safety, as early adopters in the “Quantified Self” movement make clear.  Social media systems are being linked to one another to enable cascades of events from a single message as status updates are passed among Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs automatically aggregate the results of searches and post articles that themselves may trigger other events.  Taking a photo or updating a status message can now set off a series of unpredictable events.  The result will be lives that are more publicly displayed than ever before.  Add potential improvements in audio and facial recognition and a new world of continuous observation and publication emerges.  Some benefits, like those displayed by the Google Flu tracking system, illustrate the potential for insight from aggregated sensor data.  Risks include more efficient state and corporate surveillance and self-imposed censorship.

On December 4th, I will be attending the Oxford Internet Institute‘s Forum on Relationships and the Internet which will feature researchers focused on computer-mediated relationships.  Rather than being used primarily to access information, people often use networked computing to access people, creating or sustaining relationships with others.  There are many ways in which the Internet and a range of applications are now used to find new people, find old people, maintain primary connections, sustain weak ties, and build personal and professional relationships.  Dating sites are a clear part of the Internet relationship picture but so are professional “dating” services like LinkedIn or professional services directories like Craig’s List, social networking services like Facebook, and “normal” tools like email.  People now use a concerted set of Internet tools in building and maintaining their relationships.

Researchers are interested in online dating and social networking.  They are now exploring the role of information and communication technologies in all forms of interpersonal relationships.  Practitioners from a growing and international relationship industry who want to cultivate and manage these relationship systems will attend along with policy-makers who seek to regulate their uses towards positive ends and avoid abuses.

Speakers include:

• Bill Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute
• Nai Li, Oxford Internet Institute
• Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute
• Ellen Helsper, London School of Economics
• Monica Whitty, Nottingham-Trent University
• Barry Wellman, University of Toronto and Director of NetLab
• Joe Walther, Michigan State University
• Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University

Research in Internet relationships goes beyond a focus on dating sites and services to incorporate all the stages and types of relationships being shaped by social information technology.  My demonstration will illustrate the ways NodeXL can map relationships in a variety of social media spaces, including YouTube, flickr, email, twitter, and (with the help of Bernie Hogan’s ego-network importer) Facebook.  These maps can be a useful ways of distinguishing different kinds of relationship patterns present in these spaces, identifying key participants who acts as hubs or bridges.

The OII also maintains a video webcast site with a great collection of recordings of lectures and panel discussions of a variety of  topics related to the Internet and society.  In particular, check out Duncan Watts presenting a talk on “Using the Web to do Social Science“.

Next week I will be attending and discussing mobile social media and social networks at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is my first time to Africa and I am excited to both visit and to discuss how mobile networked devices can change social organizations.  Mobile devices are in many ways more important in emerging and developing regions where the availability of these tools enable the first voice and data services that have ever been affordable and reliable, let alone mobile.  There are vast opportunities in this space, a topic well reviewed in the recent issue of the Economist:

The Mobile Web Africa event will focus on these key questions:

1. How will the industry evolve to a point where the vast majority of people have access to the mobile web and the content they want to view?
2. How will the industry fully exploit existing and future opportunities?
3. How can PC or mobile based developers and start-ups monetise their innovation and creativity to grow in to companies that will drive the expansion of the ecosystem?
4. How can Operators, Original Equipment Manufacturers, global associations and other mobile powerhouses assist their smaller partners?
5. How can societal and economic problems be tackled by the development of the capabilities of the mobile device?
6. What handsets, standards, networks and designs will allow consumers to successfully access the content and consume it?
7. How will the consumer be able to discover that content – through an Application, Browser, Search Engine, Advert, Social Network?

I will focus my discussion on the idea of the “Electrification of the Interaction Order” and topics related to the growing use of sensors on mobile devices and the sharing of the resulting data.  A service like SenseNetworks is a  good example of a mobile data collection, analysis, and presentation service.  Other sites, like Quantified Self, CureTogether, and FitBit, are examples of the social movements, web applications, and devices that are emerging in the self-monitoring medical tracking space.  These communities overlap with the trail based exercise communities of runners, bikers, skaters, hikers, and skiers, some with artistic inclinations.  I see a new wave of devices that are extensively quantify your “self” and “others”, perhaps when people swap sensor data with one another.  The recent work of Nathan Eagle and his co-authors illustrate the possibilities of using many devices with (already existing and widely used) sensors can generate remarkable maps of human behavior.  Much of this data will take the form of social networks as people are linked by “hyperties” – forms of association and connection that are authored by machines from the records of association and behavior.  People will be linked who have never met, in the same way that web book store customers who have never met can be linked by common browse and purchase patterns.  Hyperties will be formed by shared use of location, even if at different times, or patterns created by passing through different spaces at different times but in common patterns (Starbucks, then gas?  Or subway then tea shop?).  The notion of “Tribes” used by the SenseNetworks company is a good example of this approach.    The Economist is all over this topic, with another article “Mobile phones Sensors and sensitivity” that captures the topic.  Jonathan Donner’s work is also a good resource for insights on the role of mobile technology in many parts of the world.  The ability to enable a form of banking service is a particular benefit for the many people who do not have access to banking services.