Connected Action

The United States State of the Union address this year will be held Tuesday evening, 25 January 2011. The event is a globally visible opportunity for the President of the United States to present the Administration’s vision for its agenda for the year to the people of the US and the world. The hashtag #stateoftheunion [...]

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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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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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On Saturday 11 December 2010 A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom (http://personaldemocracy.com/pdfleaks) was held in New York City. I did not attend in person, but the event was streamed live.  A colleague of mine, Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc), a sociologist from the University of Maryland ebiquity group, did attend and spoke on the second panel of [...]

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I visited the SONIC group at Northwestern University for a talk about social media networks on October 22, 2010.

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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 [...]

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I am coming to understand what is interesting in any particular network visualization by looking at many network visualizations. Using NodeXL, I have made several maps of  social media networks of people talking about several topics of interest from current events to conferences I attend.  You can find a collection of them on flickr. I [...]

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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”. [...]

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NodeXL Network Server Frequently Asked Questions The NodeXL team has released a new version (v.1.0.1.126) with better support for collecting data from social media network sources, starting with Twitter.  The NodeXL Network Server program now ships in every NodeXL installation.  Tony, the lead developer on the team, created the following FAQ to explain how to [...]

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Hello!  If you would like to request a custom social media network map made with NodeXL, complete the form below.  I will generate the maps as requests come in and email you a pointer to the results which I will post to my flickr feed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/ Loading… Here is a sample map for the [...]

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I spoke on June 4th at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City about what social media network maps can tell us about various political figures and topics. The video is available here: http://streams.civicolive.com/stream/127/5040/6000. Political discussions are obviously a major area of social media use. This talk explores the ways social network analysis and visualization [...]

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by Dru! Can useful observations be made by studying the social media sea one bucket at a time? NodeXL has data import “spigots” for pulling social networks out of several social media systems including Twitter, YouTube, flickr, and email.  Twitter networks of follows and followers, reply and mentions can be extracted based on either a [...]

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Building on the earlier post about the twitter network maps for topics like “oil spill“, “bp“, and “solar“, here is a map of the terms “climate change” and “global warming”.  This first map is of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the term “climate change”.  There is a sizable population of  isolates, people who tweet [...]

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The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a topic of great concern to many people in twitter. This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “oil spill”.  There are lots of isolated authors, people who tweeted “oil spill” but are not connected to anyone else who said the [...]

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The WWW2010 conference is underway in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is a map of the connections among the population of people who recently tweeted the term “WWW2010″.  The size of the profile photos indicates the log scaled number of followers that person has.  The edges vary in weight, thicker edges mean more of the three [...]

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