University of Maryland Computer Science Class (CMSC734) Student Projects Put NodeXL to Work: Finding Insights in Diverse Networks

11DecMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Graduate students in Computer Science at the University of Maryland in a class on information visualization produced a striking variety of NodeXL network analysis visualizations for their recent homework projects. The class, taught by Prof. Ben Shneiderman (www.cs.umd.edu/~ben), covers commercial tools, such as Spotfire and Tableau, and research software, giving students a chance to learn a range of existing visualization techniques and tools. The NodeXL homework project is done by individual students, midway in the semester, while 5-person student teams are also busy working on their major term projects, which create novel visualization tools for specialized applications. To see all the projects, click:

https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_f13/index.php?title=Homework_Number_2

(Don’t be deterred by security warnings, the class wiki is open for all to read, but only students can edit)!

Several of the 30 projects deal with Facebook, Twitter, email, Wikipedia, and YouTube social networks, with academic citation patterns and sports networks adding variety. Entertainment, finance and medical analyses round out the collection, showing the huge range of potential NodeXL applications. Students had only two weeks to find data, import it, clean it, and then create meaningful visualizations that enabled them to find interesting insights into connected structures.

Gregory Kramida’s analysis of stock symbol co-occurrences in financial articles

Gregory Kramida analyzed the connections among company names in the business press. See:

https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_f13/images/9/9f/Analysis_of_Stock_Symbol_Co-occurences_in_Financial_Articles.pdf

The project shows the strong linkages between technology companies and consumer services, finance and public utilities. The data set of more than 50,000 financial articles had more than 400,000 co-occurrences of stock ticker symbols. He used the NodeXL grouping feature to organize the stocks into groups by industry and then showed results using the Group-in-a-Box layout feature. This network is limited to companies that were mentioned together at least 50 times.

Ruofei Du’s analysis of co-authorship patterns

Ruofei Du probed the relationship among authors in 1033 scientific papers from the 1988 to 2013 User Interface Software & Technology (UIST) conference. See:

https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_f13/images/b/bd/Uist_viz2.pdf

The co-author collaborations followed commonly seen patterns of professors and their students, but the relationships between academia and industry showed novel patterns. After grouping authors by their organizations, it is apparent that Microsoft is well-represented at this conference through numerous collaborations with universities.

Joshua Brule’s analysis of actor co-performance connections from the television series Firefly

Joshua Brule created an intriguing story of television and film actors and actresses that emerges from analysis of ten actors from the cancelled television series Firefly. See:

https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_f13/images/7/76/Firefly.pdf

The actors had few collaborations before appearing on the program, but many afterwards. The carefully constructed bipartite network shows how ten actors collaborated in 38 films, television shows, or videogames.

October 2, 2013: Washington, DC NodeXL Meetup – Join us for an afternoon of social media network analysis

22SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL users in the Washington DC area are welcome to join a free users group meetup on October 2, 2013 at 2pm.

There will be a morning session at the University of Maryland (9-11) and an afternoon session downtown.

If you’d like to attend, please complete this form.

I hope to see you there!

Upcoming 2013 NodeXL / Social Media Network Analysis Training Events

23JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Upcoming events, lectures and workshops related to NodeXL:

September 20, 2013:
School of Journalism, College of Communication, University of Texas – Austin

September 26-27, 2013
Universidad Externado, Bogota, Columbia

October 19, 2013:

Kredible.Net workshop, Stanford University, CA http://kredible.net/in/

October 24th, 2013:
Arizona State University

December 12 – 14 , 2013
DISC2013 International Conference on Social Network Analsysis in Daegu, South Korea – http://bit.ly/17LtWlo

July 28 – August 1, 2013 – DSST (Digital Societies and Social Technologies) Summer Institute @ University of Maryland – NodeXL Training

11JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

July 28 – August 1, 2013
DSST 2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute: NodeXL Training
University of Maryland — College Park, Maryland USA

I will be teaching a workshop on Thursday August 1st on using NodeXL for social media network analysis at the upcoming 2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute at the University of Maryland. The Institute is devoted to training researchers in methods and theory that can help frame research into the social impacts of information technology:

MOOCs, Education and learning; personal health and well-being; open innovation, eScience, and citizen science; co-production, open source, and new forms of work; cultural heritage and information access; energy management and climate change; civic hacking, engagement and government; disaster response; cybersecurity and privacy – these are just a few problem domains where effective design and robust understanding of complex sociotechnical systems is critical. To meet these challenges a trans-disciplinary community of scholars has come together from fields as wide ranging as CSCW, HCI, social computing, organization studies, information visualization, social informatics, sociology, information systems, medical informatics, computer science, ICT for development, education, learning science, journalism, and political science.

For more information about the Summer Institute, contact the Summer Institute co-coordinators, Brian Butler (bsbutler@umd.edu) and Susan Winter (sjwinter@umd.edu). For information about the broader community of researchers interested in design and study of sociotechnical systems, see: CSST (www.sociotech.net), Social Webshop (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/webshop2012/), the “Researchers of the Socio-Technical” Facebook group, or the CSST listserv (csst@listserv.syr.edu).

Here are the slides from my talk:

2013 NodeXL Social Media Network Analysis from Marc Smith

Dr. Cody Dunne speaks about Network Motif Simplification at the recent CHI 2013 conference in Paris, France

06MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Here is Dr. Cody Dunne speaking about a new information visualization technique called “Network Motif Simplification” at the recent CHI 2013 conference in Paris, France.

Dr. Cody Dunne at CHI 2013 (Photo Credit: Ben Shneiderman)

Networks, no matter how complex, are composed of simpler, smaller structures, called motifs. Some of these structures are easy to identify, like the pattern of a “star” where a single node acts as the sole connection to a connected component for one or more “pendant” nodes with a single tie. Another common pattern are nodes that are “parallel bridges” which share the only two connections they have with two or more other nodes. These common structures can be identified and removed and replaced with more efficient and comprehensible representations.

His paper with Prof. Ben Shneiderman at CHI 2013, “Motif simplification: improving network visualization readability with fan, connector, and clique glyphs“, demonstrates a novel method for improving the quality of network visualizations. Common network motifs appear frequently in networks. In network motif simplification these patterns are removed and replaced with simpler composite images:

Motifs collapse into simple glyphs

The result is a simplification of the network visualization, removing clutter to reveal the core structural properties of interest.

A complex network of voting relationships in the
2007 United State Senate is reduced to a simplified form

This method for collapsing complex network graphs into simpler forms has been implemented in NodeXL. Look for the feature in the NodeXL Ribbon menu, in the NodeXL > Analysis > Groups > Group by Motif… option.

NodeXL implements network motif simplification

The feature allows users to select the types of motifs that should be recognized and collapsed:

Users select network motifs to find and replace

The paper has been reviewed by Stephen Few on the Perceptual Edge Visual Business Intelligence blog.

Here is Dr. Dunne’s video explaining and demonstrating the concept:

For more information about the project, see: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/nicernetvis

2012 Summer Social Webshop at University of Maryland

23AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

[flickr id=”7831570160″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]

During August 21-24, 2012 Summer Social Webshop gathered 55 students and 20 speakers for a week of presentations, discussions, and collaboration around the study and application of social media to social good. Sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Social Media Research Foundation, and Grand, the Webshop brings doctoral students in computer science, iSchool, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines together for 4-days of intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP).

Technology-Mediated Social Participation includes social networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, and other social media applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety.

During the 4-day workshop, students attended presentations from an interdisciplinary group of leaders in the field and engage in other research and community-building activities like working on short-term projects, sharing research plans, developing new research collaborations, learning relevant software, analysis methods and data collection tools, and meeting Federal policy makers.

Videos and slides from talks:

Ben	Shniederman	Introduction to TMSP
Elizabeth	Churchill	Data by Design
Bernie	Hogan	A survey of Facebook as a research site
Noshir	Contractor	Organizing in the 21st century
David	MacDonald	Social Translucence in Wikipedia
Marc	Smith	Mapping social media spaces
Alan	Neustadtl	Realizing the potential of data
Eszter	Hargittai	Digital Inequality for Internet Research
Ines	Mergel	Social media adoption in the public sector
Libby	Hemphill	Elected Officials and Social Media
Nancy	Baym	Musicians and Social Media
Lise	Getoor	Link Mining
David	Huffaker	Applying Social Research at Google
Cliff	Lampe	Understanding Large-scale Interaction
Gerhard	Fischer	Cultures of Participation
Lee	Rainie	Networked
Zeynep	Tufekci	Why <<More>> is Different
Zeynep	Tufekci	Converstation at Brookings Institution
Jessica	Vitak	Tech & Relationships: It’s Complicated
Katie	Shilton	Participatory Personal Data
Jennifer	Golbeck	Politics on Twitter
Kevin	Crowston	Socio-Computational Research
Jana	Diesner	Words and Networks
Paul	Resnick	Social Approaches to Health and Wellness
Zeynep	Tufekci	Why <<More>> is Different
Itai	Himelboim	Information Sources on Twitter

Photos from the event:

[flickrset id=”72157631177125858″ thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”small”]

Webshop 2011 review: 4 days, 20 talks, 45 students, an earthquake, a hurricane and many new connections

25SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

Eventful. The 2011 Webshop at the University of Maryland was certainly that with both an earthquake and a hurricane to mark the start and end of the event. We really moved heaven and earth at this workshop.

In 4 days, 20 talks, 45 students, an earthquake, a hurricane and many new connections – the Webshop touched on a set of related concepts, methods, and findings about ways to use communication and computation technology to help groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations work collectively towards common goals.

Several years ago a program at the University of Maryland called “Webshop” (Web Workshop) was organized by Professor John Robinson and held for three consecutive Summers. I visited and spoke at two of these events and know many people who attended or spoke at one or more and remember the event enthusiastically. The students who attended include some of the now leading researchers in the field of social science studies of the internet. There is an impressive alumni list.

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since. Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad,FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run. Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind. A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

After many years of inactivity, the Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) happened again! With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, on August 23-26, 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students heard and engaged with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives. Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event gathered students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies. Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines applied to attend the 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). The workshop explored the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety. The workshop attracted graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

–

Organizers

Alan Neustadtl (@smilex3md) – Sociology, University of Maryland
Jennifer Preece (@jenpre) – iSchool, University of Maryland
Marc Smith(@Marc_Smith) – Social Media Research Foundation
Ben Shneiderman (@benbendc) – Computer Science, University of Maryland
PJ Rey (@pjrey) – Sociology, University of Maryland, Student Coordinator

–

Photos

[flickrset id=”72157627509211294″ thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”small”]

23-26 August 2011 – Summer Social Webshop (Webshop 2.0) – The return of a great tradition

10JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since. Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad, FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run. Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind. A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

The Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) is happening again! With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, this August 23-26 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students will hear and engage with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives. Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event will gather students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies. Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines are invited to apply to attend this summer’s 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). The workshop explores the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety. The workshop should be of interest to graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

For more information, please contact Alan Neustadtl (alan.neustadtl@gmail.com).

–

Photos

[flickrset id=”72157627509211294″ thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”small”]

NodeXL v.167 – New features for handling groups of nodes in a network (and a few other things)

04MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The NodeXL team at the Social Media Research Foundation is happy to announce the availability of the newest version: there is lots of new stuff in the latest release of NodeXL v.1.0.1.167!

Group Frames: If your graph has groups and you choose to lay out the groups in their own boxes (NodeXL, Graph, Layout, Layout Options), you can now specify the width of the box outlines.

Constant Edges: When you select an edge, its width no longer changes. NodeXL used to use the same width for all selected edges, even if the edges had varying widths when unselected.
Group and Vertex Display Harmony:
- When a graph has groups, you now have more control over how the groups are shown. Go to NodeXL, Analysis, Groups, Group Options.
- The NodeXL, Show/Hide, Graph Elements, Groups menu item has been replaced with a checkbox in the Group Options dialog box.
Right-Click Group Controls: Menu items for selecting, expanding, collapsing and removing groups are now available in the menu that appears when you right-click the graph pane. (These are just shortcuts for the same menu items that are available in the Ribbon at NodeXL, Analysis, Groups.)

WYSIWYCC: What You See Is What You Can Click –
- Hidden edges and vertices (those that have their Visibility cells set to Hide) can no longer be selected in the graph pane.
- Edges and vertices that have been filtered (NodeXL, Analysis, Dynamic Filters) can no longer be selected in the graph pane.
Bigger Twitter Lists: When importing a Twitter list network (NodeXL, Import, From Twitter List Network), you can now enter up to 10,000 usernames. The maximum used to be 500.
UCINET / Matrix Compatibility: Bug fix: When exporting the graph to a UCINET file (NodeXL, Data, Export, To UCINET Full Matrix DL File), isolated vertices didn’t get exported. When exporting the graph to a new matrix workbook (NodeXL, Data, Export, To New Matrix Workbook), isolated vertices didn’t get exported, when importing a graph from a matrix workbook (NodeXL, Data, Import, From Open Matrix Workbook), isolated vertices didn’t get imported. Now they do!

HICSS 2011 Paper: EventGraphs: Charting Collections of Conference Connections

09JanMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

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. Derek Hansen presented the paper on January 7, 2011.

Hansen, D., Smith, M., Shneiderman, B., EventGraphs: charting collections of conference connections. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Forty-Forth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). January 4-7, 2011. Kauai, Hawaii.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reports-search.php?number=2010-13

Our paper is about visualizing social media and it describes the visualization of the patterns of connections formed when people tweet about events like conferences and news stories.

EventGraphs are social media network diagrams constructed from content selected by its association with time-bounded events, such as conferences. Many conferences now communicate a common “hashtag” or keyword to identify messages related to the event. EventGraphs help make sense of the collections of connections that form when people follow, reply or mention one another and a keyword. This paper defines EventGraphs, characterizes different types, and shows how the social media network analysis add-in NodeXL supports their creation and analysis. The paper also identifies the structural and conversational patterns to look for and highlight in EventGraphs and provides design ideas for their improvement.

A collection of EventGraphs are available in flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157625618025980/

The EventGraph for HICSS this year is here: 20110109-NodeXL-Twitter-HICSS

The top most between contributors to the HICSS Twitter graph this year are: @arcticpenguin @avantgame @barrywellman @clifflampe @dalprof @chandlerism @shakmatt @marc_smith @shen045 and @thecatandthekey

Here is the data set: 20110109-NodeXL-Twitter-HICSS
Graph Metric Value
Graph Type Directed
Vertices 92
Unique Edges 243
Edges With Duplicates 71
Total Edges 314
Self-Loops 0
Connected Components 21
Single-Vertex Connected Components 18
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 69
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 307
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 8
Average Geodesic Distance 3.081693
Graph Density 0.032967033

NodeXL Version 1.0.1.159

An article about social media visualization Social Seen: Analyzing and Visualizing Data from Social Networks by Hunter Whitney, appeared in UX Magazine on December 15, 2010. It provides a great round up of tools and approaches to mapping populations in social media spaces.

Previous HICSS papers:

Gleave, Eric, Howard T. Welser, Marc Smith, and Thomas Lento. 2009. “A conceptual and operational definition of social role in online community.” In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), January 5-8. Computer Society Press. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Mini-Track)

2009 – HICSS – 42 – Best Paper – A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community

Fisher, D., Smith, M., and Welser, H. You Are Who You Talk To, Proceedings of HICSS, January 2006. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Program)

http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/2006-HICSS-You-Are-Who-You-Talk-To-Detecting-Roles-in-Usenet-Newsgroups.pdf

Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. “Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces“, Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004. (Best Paper: Persistent Conversation Minitrack)

http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/2004-HICSS-Viegas-and-Smith-Newsgroup-Crowds-and-Author-Lines.pdf

Here are some sample event graphs:
[flickrset id=”72157625618025980″ thumbnail=”square”]