Connected Action

A new paper on visualizing social media has been released on the University of Maryland, Human Computer Interaction Laboratory tech report archive.  Co-authored by Derek Hansen,  myself, and Ben Shneiderman, the paper describes and visualizes the patterns of connections formed when people tweet about events like conferences and news stories. EventGraphs_2010_HCIL_Tech_Report http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reports-search.php?number=2010-13 Hansen, D., Smith, [...]

[Read more →]

Ben Shneiderman spoke on June 2, 2010 at the Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University in an event organized by UPA Israel and the Leon Recanati School of Business. 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 [...]

[Read more →]

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/soh/ The HCIL Government Applications of Social Media Networks & Communities Workshop, as part of the 27th Annual Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) Symposium, at the University of Maryland, examined how social media can be systematically applied to increase civic participation on national priorities. When: Friday, May 28, 2010, 9:30am-4:00pm Where: CSIC Building, UMD, College Park Who: Government thought [...]

[Read more →]

Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-10) May 23-26, 2010 George Washington University, Washington, DC Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The ICWSM 2010 conference starts Sunday.  This is a very high quality conference on the study of social media.  My colleague, Professor Derek Hansen, and I will [...]

[Read more →]

I am joining Media-X at Stanford University as a visiting scholar. I will work with Martha Russell and Chuck House in applying social network analysis to social media research. You can email me at masmith1@stanford.edu! Our next event will be in late July and will focus on the use of social media analysis for mapping patterns [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

There are hundreds of conferences sponsored by the ACM on almost every topic related to computing.  In some cases the same person will publish a paper in more than one conference, creating a tie between them.  Below is a network map application that displays a collection of ACM conferences connected by this authorship tie: http://bosch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:5080/AERCS/Networks.jsp [...]

[Read more →]

Here is a great piece of social media research from the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies. Prof. Jen Golbeck and Justin Grimes analyzed 6,000 tweets from United States Congress members.  They found some interaction but a dominant broadcast pattern of use with a focus on self-promotion.  The Washington Post headlines the results as “Tweeting [...]

[Read more →]

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting at the University of Maryland in College Park of a working group proposing a new “National Initiative for Social Participation”.  The meeting brought together people from the major universities, research labs, and government funding agencies to think about an “Apollo Program for Social Media”.  The idea is [...]

[Read more →]