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 can be applied to mapping discussions of political issues and topics. It features a number of NodeXL generated visualizations of twitter crowds and networks that form around topics like the conference hashtag #PDF2010 (and #PDF10) as well as political and current event relevant terms.
I was also interviewed by Deb Berman from JustMeans.com after the presentation to describe the NodeXL project a bit more:
Here are some sample images of NodeXL topic network maps from the talk:
2010 – June – 3 – NodeXL – Twitter – PDF2010: This map represents the connections among people who tweeted the term “PDF2010”. It illustrates the people in the “center” and the sub-clusters in the map. People who occupy “bridge” locations are visible as well.
2010 – June 1 – NodeXL – Twitter – #tcot: This is a map of the “Top Conservatives on Twitter” tag. It has a large dominant cluster and a tiny sub group of tcot critics.
2010 – June 1 – NodeXL – Twitter – #p2: The #p2 hashtag is used by “Progressive 2.0” discussions. It features a clear dominant cluster of supporters and a smaller cluster of skeptics made up largely of conservatives.
Outside the CUNY Graduate Center auditorium during PDF2010.
Clay Shirky’s talk was great: it wove together stories of collective action for good and trivial purposes that framed a call to increase the costs of political activity on the net rather than reduce as a way to improve the impact of contribution rather than their mere scale.
Howard Rheingold’s discussion with Micha Sifry was insightful, focusing on the ways the Internet can lull us into a lack of mindfullness. A Mindfull approach, Howard encourages, is one where we are not as easily pulled into random tangents and drift aimlessly from link to link and click to click.
Craig Newmark
Marc Smith and Craig Newmark
Hi Marc! Really enjoyed your talk at PDF10. Any chance NODEXL will be available for Excel for Mac without having to use Parallels or other such software?
Hello! Thanks for the feedback. A cross-platform version of NodeXL is a pending work item. We share your desire to reach users on all platforms. At the moment, however, we are not yet funded to enable delivery on that work item. Perhaps as we grow, we will gain support to enable that feature. In the meantime, I run VMWare, Windows and Office on my Mac to get to NodeXL.