There is a Stanford Media X event on July 22nd, 2010 on new tools for SNA:
Network Analysis Made Easy: Using NodeXL To Map Social Media Networks
http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/marc.html
Bring a laptop (running Windows and Office 2007 or 2010) to this workshop and you can be analyzing a social media network from systems like Twitter, flickr, YouTube and your own email by the end of the day. If you can make a pie-chart in Excel, using the free and open NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) you can now make a rich network graph from data extracted from social media systems and other common formats. If you have a network, bring it, if not you can bring a suggested topic that we can map during the course of the day.
Even if you leave your laptop behind or have a Mac (sorry, no version is yet available for MacOS – unless you have a virtual machine with Windows and Office) this workshop will introduce the core concepts of network science with application to social networks in general and social media networks in particular. Applied to a range of topics and services, social media network maps can illuminate a variety of “publics” – populations who share a common interest and may share connections. Maps of topics like “oil spill”, “global warming” and other issue and event related keywords can reveal the groups and factions that cluster around different concepts and terms. Key contributors in these maps can be identified through the application of network measurements that capture various aspects of a person’s location in a network graph.