Curved edges have arrived in NodeXL (v. 174).
Here is a network visualization with all the edges drawn as straight lines:
The same network graph can be drawn with slightly curved edges:
The result is a slight improvement in readability.
To start, the edges curve just a bit. Soon, we will allow user control over the extent of the curvature.
Turn on curved edges by checking the box in the Graph Options dialog accessed from the graph pane.
Here is a map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term “AEJMC” on August 7, 2011:
The top most between people in this network are:@aejmc, @jlab, @karenrussell, @terryflynn, @natcomm, @tmccorkindale, @derigansilver, @tkell, @aejmconlineads, and @jeremyhl:
I will present a Workshop on Social Media Network Analysis and NodeXL at the 9 August 2011 – Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (http://www.aejmc.com) in St. Louis, Missouri along with my colleague Professor Hernando Rojas, from the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
See: http://www.aejmc.com/home/events/annual-convention/
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.
Our session is:
Using NodeXL for Social Network Analysis
Tuesday — 2 pm to 5 pm
Presented by Communication Theory and Methodology Division
This pre-conference workshop examines social network analysis. Social network analysis can be used to examine message boards, blogs, and friend networks (amongmany other phenomena). Participants will learn to use the NodeXL program to conduct a network analysis. For information, contact Michel M. Haigh, Pennsylvania State University at mmh25@psu.edu.
On June 22nd in New York City Wired Magazine and the Economist hosted a day of discussions and displays related to the theme of “Nextwork” hosted by Juniper Networks and located at the Tribeca Rooftop.
The Social Media Research Foundation displayed and printed Nextwork Networks maps of the connections among the people who tweeted about the conference, the speakers, and their companies.
Visit the NextWork Network booth hosted by the Social Media Research Foundation to see a map of the connections among people who tweeted the term “NextWork“. Networks are important data structures but the tools to access, analyze and visualize networks have been hard to use. New tools now make networks as easy to handle as making a pie chart. NodeXL, the free and open network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for the familiar Excel spreadsheet, makes creating network diagrams and gaining insights much simpler (see: http://nodexl.codeplex.com). Using NodeXL, we have been collecting all the tweets that mention the NextWork event and building a network map of the ways those people connect to one another. Not everyone is equally connected: some people occupy more strategic locations in the web of connections than others. Find out who: request your own NodeXL social media network map for your Twitter account or the name of your company or brand (or your competitors) by dropping by the booth (or visit: http://www.smrfoundation.org/nextwork2011).
Here is an example, a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the name “Kevin Kelly”, one of the speakers at the event:
This is a map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term “Nextwork”:
The widely used Microsoft Exchange email server contains many networks that are created as people reply to one another and join various groups and distribution lists.
A new NodeXL data provider (“spigot“) is now available to extract these social networks from Exchange servers.
This is the Exchange Spigot for NodeXL a configurable interface for defining and executing a query against a Microsoft Exchange email server designed to be used with NodeXL.
NodeXL is an easy to use add-in for the familiar Excel spreadsheet that adds support for network overview, discovery and exploration. The free and open NodeXL project has several import data providers that extract and display networks from popular social media network repositories like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, the WWW and more.
By adding an Exchange Spigot to your installation of NodeXL you gain a simple way to extract networks from your own email stored on an Exchange server. With appropriate permissions and in compliance with local and legal requirements, the Exchange Spigot can access email and extract social network data across multiple email user accounts.
If available, Active Directory metadata is integrated with email data extracted from the Exchange server. Profile metadata is added to the network workbook when available (typically only for email from other employees, not people from outside your company or division).
The Exchange Spigot for NodeXL is one of several related projects to provide a connection between valuable sources of network data structures and the easy-to-use network browser, NodeXL. Additional projects have implemented connections to web crawlers, Facebook, and soon, SharePoint.
The Exchange Spigot for NodeXL project team includes: Luka Potkonjak, Milos Lazarevic, Ivan Vujic, Natasa Milic-Frayling, and Marc Smith.
The Exchange Spigot for NodeXL project is coordinated by the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org) and receives generous support from Microsoft Research.
Every network visualization should have a legend that explains what the colors, edge widths, and filters are that define the network graph.
NodeXL automatically generates a network legend and displays it when the Graph Elements menu is opened:
And the “Legend” option is selected.
This will place a legend at the bottom of the visualization canvas:
Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011
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.
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).
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I am very interested in the Quantified Self conference to be held in Mountain View, California, May 28 and 29. While I have attended just a few of the in-person meet-ups, which were engaging and intriguing events, I have followed the blog and tweet stream closely. These events feature short presentations about practices, prototypes, and products that record information about our own behavior and activity. It is great to hear that, as the meet-ups grew to become very large, a conference has been organized to accommodate the demand and growing interest in the intersection of sensors and other devices with medical and personal self-monitoring. Using a variety of devices, our lives can now create detailed inscriptions that illuminate our behavior and patterns with novel clarity and detail. (See: http://quantifiedself.com/conference/)
I plan to attend. I will speak on Sunday morning at a 10:30 breakout session on using social media network analysis to map personal and collective social media spaces.
Quantifying the “Quantified Self” discussion in Twitter: Here is a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the string “quantified self” on May 25th, 2011.
[flickr id=”5760875146″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]
Click for larger image.
The top most between participants in this graph were:
[flickr id=”5760331211″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]
@timoreilly
@quantifiedself (-1)
@harscoat (-)
@edyson
@qsparis
@egadenne (-4)
@agaricus (-)
@brunoaziza
@adriana872
@chloester
Bolded users also appeared in a previous map made earlier in the year, on January 20, 2011, which looked like this:
This is the list of the most “between” users in this network on January 20th, 2011:
The most between participants in this graph are: @quantifiedself, @egadenne, @harscoat, @genomera, @neufit, @jxa, @agaricus, @emergentorder, @bulletproofexec, @2healthguru.
The topics discussed in the quantifiedself tweet stream can be rendered as a network graph based on words that co-occur:
[flickrset id=”72157626748710875″ thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”false” size=”small”]
The ACM CHI 2011 Conference is taking place in Vancouver, BC.
May 10, 2011
May 8, 2011
These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word chi2011 when queried on May 8, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.
Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.
A larger version of the network map is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5701022497/sizes/o/in/ph…
Top most between users:
@chi2011
@msftresearch
@edchi
@jeffbigham
@landay
@evanmpeck
@acagamic
@clifflampe
@yardi
@eytanadar
Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 421
Unique Edges: 3849
Edges With Duplicates: 324
Total Edges: 4173
Self-Loops: 0
Connected Components: 32
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 29
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 384
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4146
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 6
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.553249
Graph Density: 0.022587943
NodeXL Version1.0.1.167
NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl
NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.
29 June – 2 July 2011
Queensland University of Technology
Tweet with the hashtag #ct2011
C&T 2011 OVERVIEW
The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference is the premier international forum for stimulating scholarly debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies.
C&T 2011 welcomes participation from researchers, designers, educators, industry, and students from the many disciplines and perspectives bearing on the interaction between community and technology, including architecture, arts, business, design, economics, education, engineering, ergonomics, information technology, geography, health, humanities, law, media and communication studies, and social sciences. The conference program will include competitively selected, peer-reviewed papers, as well as pre-conference workshops, a doctoral consortium, and invited keynote and panel speakers.
Marcus Foth
Conference Chair
IMPORTANT DATES
Continue reading
The Royal Wedding is a topic of great interest around the world.
[flickr id=”5666637994″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]
This is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the words #rw2011 when queried on April 28, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded), connected by replying, mentioning and following.
Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.
A larger version of the network map is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5666637994/sizes/o/
A detailed list of top most between users is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5666069249/
Top most between users: @nytimes, @skynews, @peoplemag, @royalweddingcnn, @itv_news, @katewilliam2011, @julieetchitv, @abc, @cbsnews, @abcroyals
Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 1735
Edges With Duplicates: 531
Total Edges: 2266
Self-Loops: 0
Connected Components: 271
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 246
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 701
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 2199
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 11
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.892905
Graph Density: 0.001984985
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.166
NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl
NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.
The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.