
May 1st, 2015 at LSU: NodeXL social media networks talk at the “Telling Stories and Using Visuals for Coastal Environmental Communication” workshop

Best Practice in Data Journalism Workshop
PROGRAM
29-30 September 2014
Terrace Lounge, Level 1, Walter Boas Building, Parkville Campus
(Campus map at http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville)
MONDAY 29 SEPTEMBER
9-9.30AM | REGISTRATION AND WELCOME |
9.30-9.45am | WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS- DR MARGARET SIMONS AND CARLTON CONNECT |
9.45am-11 | Presentations and Q and A from journalists: Marc Moncrieff and Craig Butt – Fairfax Media; Lisa Cornish – Red Cross (formerly News Corp); Harrison Polites – Business Spectator. |
11-11.30 | MORNING TEA |
11.30-12.30 | Presentations by Journalists (continued): Ed Tadros – Australian Financial Review; Matt Liddy, ABC; Nick Evershed – The Guardian in Australia. |
12.30-1PM | ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION AND IDENTIFICATION OF COMMON THEMES AND CHALLENGES |
1PM-2PM | LUNCH |
2PM-2.30pm | AURIN – Exploring the potential – Presentation by Professor Richard Sinnott, University of Melbourne. |
2.30-3pm | NodeXL – Exploring the potential – Presentation by Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation |
3-3.30pm | AFTERNOON TEA |
3.30PM-5PM | Panel Session – Big Data. What Next? With Craig Thomler (Delib), Professor Paul Jensen (Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne); Jodie McVernon, (School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne), Scott Ewing, (World Internet Project, Swinburne Institute for Social Research.) |
There will be a 3 hour session introducing NodeXL on Tuesday from 2-5pm 30th September at the main Parkville campus of UniMelb. The event is open to the public and is free.
It will be in the Old Arts Building Lecture Theatre B.
The main session will run from 2-4pm and there will be an additional hour for those that want to stop on for further training, finishing at 5pm
If you want to use NodeXL in the session, you will need a Windows laptop, and the Windows version of Excel (2007/2010/2013).
You can download NodeXL in advance from: http://nodexl.codeplex.com/.
Map and Building:
http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/149#.VCTinmS1Zlo
Download instructions:
Upcoming talks, workshops and training for social media network analysis and NodeXL.
March 16, 2014: Predictive Analytics World, San Francisco.
Track 1: Social Media Analysis Think Link! Network Insights with No Programming Skills
March 18: Consortium for Service Innovation Annual Member Summit
April 2 – April 4, 2014, UCDC Center, Washington DC, USA, 2014 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (SBP14)
April 24-24, 2014 The Next Web, Amsterdam
May 1-2, 2014: The Social Media & Web Analytics Summit
May 8th, 2014: 2014 SQL PASS Business Analytics Conference in San Jose.
May 19-23, 2014: International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems, Minneapolis, Minnesota
June 27-29 2014: Networks in the Global World 2014. Bridging Theory and Methods: American, European and Russian Studies
The INSNA Sunbelt social network conference will be held February 18-23 at the TradeWinds Island Resort on the island of St. Pete Beach.
There will be NodeXL related talks at the conference.
NodeXL: Network Analysis Made Simple
Tuesday February 18, 8:00am – 11:00am & 11:30am – 2:30pm
Marc Smith, Social Media Research Foundation
CITRUS Ballroom
Twitter Conversations as Network Structures: Typology and Measurements
Saturday February 22,
Itai Himelboim, Marc Smith, Ben Shneiderman, Lee Rainie
The conference schedule is available.
I hope to see you at the conference!
The origin of Avatars, MMOs, and Freemium – S01E06
Download this MP3 Share this on Facebook or Twitter
An interview with Chip Morningstar (and podcast hosts: Randy Farmer and Scott Moore) who created and ran the first MMOs/Virtual Worlds. This segment focuses on the emergent social phenomenon encountered the first time people used avatars with virtual currency, and artificial scarcity.
Get the podcast on iTunes.
Visit the Tumblr for the podcast.
Visit the Facebook page for the podcast.
The Social Media Clarity Podcast has just released a new episode:
This is the “Real Names for Social Order?” episode, featuring guest sociologist: Dr. Bernie Hogan (@blurky) from the Oxford Internet Institute speaking with host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) along with me & Bryce Glass (@bryceglass).
Building on the second episode which focused on the changes at the Huffington Post’s comment posting policy, in episode 3 we talk with Bernie Hogan who explains why sociologists are concerned by “context collapse” – the loss of the ability to be different people for different people – caused by social media. Sociological research suggests this is not a positive thing because humans have always maintained different roles for different groups of people and not all roles are commensurate. While time and place once kept separate roles separate, today the net makes any interaction into every interaction.
Get the podcast on iTunes.
Visit the Tumblr for the podcast.
Visit the Facebook page for the podcast.
I spend a lot of my time studying social media and the networks that form in them. But I have growing doubts about the time I spend on commercial services. Despite seeming like public spaces, these services are really not public.
Social media is increasingly the space in which public life takes place. News, debates and discussions are more likely to take place now in Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services than in public squares, civic buildings, or community centers. Virtual public spaces fill the void created by the lack of public spaces and places in our cities and towns that allow for public mixing and interaction. But virtual public spaces are just that: virtual. They are not real public spaces, and the “virtual” public space they provide is not “as if” or even better than the real thing. Virtual public space lacks many of the features of real public space and is not an upgrade over the real thing.
Virtual public spaces try to seem like public spaces, but they are like shopping malls: commercial spaces that encourage only a subset of public behaviors. Raised in commercial spaces that have replaced public spaces, many people no longer even imagine behaviors that are not welcome in a mall. Protest, petitions, organizing, and protected speech have no place in a shopping mall. Some property owners allow some forms of speech, but no one but the owners have a “right” to speech in a mall. Shoppers, consumers, guests, customers, and visitors are not citizens while they are in a commercial space.
Virtual public spaces are not public spaces, but as we spend our public time in them, we drain the life from alternative public spaces. Our collective chatter in social media becomes the intellectual property of a company not a commonly owned public asset. Our history is not our history.
Social media services vary in terms of how open or restrictive they provide data generated by their users.
Some services, like Wikipedia, are very open, offering many methods to access large and small amounts of data from recent or historical times.
Some services, like LinkedIn, are very closed, offering almost no access to any data from their service.
Twitter is becoming more restrictive while Facebook is relatively open.
For many services, the lack of access to data is not an ideological choice, rather it is a practical issue related to the costs associated with storing and serving large volumes of data. These companies are well within their rights to do as they like with their data and business plans.
However, their data is actually my data (and your data). We may soon realize that we prefer to commit our bits to repositories that hold and redistribute our content on terms that support civic goals of open access. What we need are credible alternatives to these services, with alternative funding models: perhaps a “Public Bit Service” or “National Public Retweet”?
I am delighted to be attending and presenting a workshop on social media network analysis at the University of Kentucky’s LINKS 2013 program on June 7th, 2013.
This week long program has for many years provided intensive training in network methods, research, and tools.
I am excited to attend some of the program and meet researchers and students working on networks of all sorts. I will do a short hands-on talk about NodeXL and a longer day devoted to the broader ways networks are useful for the study of social media.
The #Occupywallstreet movement is growing and lots of activity is taking place in social media. Here is a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the term “#occupywallstreet” on 8 October 2011.
[flickr id=”6225446144″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”large” group=”” align=”none”]
Link: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6225446144/
Each user is scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.
See: occupywallst.org/
A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6225446144/sizes/l/in/ph…
Top most between users:
@maddow
@motherjones
@aclu
@zerohedge
@mmfa
@spread4freedom
@diggrbiii
@angelsavant
@marychastain
@katiepavlich
Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 3835
Edges With Duplicates: 916
Total Edges: 4751
Self-Loops: 1109
Connected Components: 311
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 301
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 678
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4327
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 9
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.283708
Graph Density: 0.003408408
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179
More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/
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: