July 13-14, 2011 – Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program: NodeXL Workshop

27AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will be speaking at the Oxford Internet Institute on July 13 and 14, 2011 as part of the Summer Doctoral Program.

I will speak about the use of social network analysis and visualization techniques to analyze and understand social media.

The Summer Doctoral Program is designed to

…bring together advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research relating to the Internet and other ICTs. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their thesis research and create a peer network of excellent young researchers.

The 2011 Summer Doctoral Programme will draw substantially upon the OII’s research strengths and will involve participation from many of our faculty, together with colleagues from other partner institutions. It will emphasise methodological innovation and good practice in research design, and will expose students to the benefits of discussing their research in a multi-disciplinary teaching environment.”

NodeXL: Automatically Collapse Groups in v.166 with Autofill Columns and Conditional Collapse

26AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL allows users to gather vertices into named collections called “Groups”. This is handy whenever the entities in the network are made up of different types or an algorithm has divided the network into sub-regions based on how densely some vertices connect to one another. The Groups menu is found in the NodeXL>Analysis menu:

Since version v.132 of NodeXL it has been possible to Collapse a group of vertices (See: Expand and Collapse Groups of Vertices with NodeXL v.132). When a group is collapsed all of the vertices within that group are removed from the network graph and replaced with a single vertex with a size proportionate to the number of vertices in the group. A small “+” plus sign indicates that the vertex is a placeholder for a group of vertices.

If the user expands a collapsed group all of the vertices that had been hidden return to positions in the network visualization. The Groups menu has commands for creating, collapsing, and expanding groups.

NodeXL (v.166) now has the ability to automatically collapse or expand any group of vertices conditionally based on any attribute in the workbook using the Autofill Columns feature.

The NodeXL Autofill columns feature allows users to map data elements to display elements. At the bottom of this list (you may need to scroll down to see it) you will now find a new row: Group Collapsed?

There are several network metric attributes for each group that are created when the Find Groups and then the Graph Metrics command has been run on a network in NodeXL:

Selecting one of the data items in the drop down allows you to automatically decide if a group with those attributes will be presented in a collapsed or (default) expanded state. The data about each group include the number of vertices within the group, the number of connections between those vertices, the number of non-unique connections, the number of unique connections among the vertices, the number of self-connections, the number of unique connected components, the number of isolated vertices, the number of vertices in the largest component, the number of edges in the largest component, the maximum and average width of the largest component, and the density of the group.

These metrics allow for the automated processing of the graph to measure each group and apply a test to decide if a group is too dense or populous to be seen in an expanded state.

July 17 – July 23, 2011 – NodeXL Session at Computational Social Science Workshop, Lipari Island, Italy

25AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will be speaking at the Jacob T. Schwartz International School for Scientific Research week long Lipari School on Computational Social Science , July 17 – July 23, 2011, Lipari Island, Italy.

This year’s program is dedicated to Computational Social Science: Text and Decisions

Speakers:

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla: Director of the Center for Social Complexity, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, Washington DC.
Huan Liu: Community Detection and Mining in Social Media [abstract]
School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University
Roel Popping: Computer-assisted text analysis, and the relevance of decision making and text mining [abstract]
Department of Sociology, University of Groningen

Tutorials

Marc A. Smith: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Maps and Measures with NodeXL [abstract]
Chief Social Scientist, Connected Action Consulting Group
Calogero Zarba: Introduction to matrix algebra [abstract]
Neodata Intelligence s.r.l., Italy
Alessandro Pluchino: Netlogo: An agent based simulation programmable environment [abstract], University of Catania, Italy

iConference 2011 Wiki roles paper awarded best paper – University of Washington, Seattle, WA

24AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

http://www.ischools.org/iConference11/2011index/

Our paper, Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia, about the variety of roles people perform in Wikis received the best paper award (along with 4 others) in a field of 86 papers. The 2011 iConference accepted 86 papers, and had about 550 attendees.

The paper is authored by: Howard T. Welser at Ohio University, Austin Lin at Cornell University and Microsoft, Dan Cosley, Fedor Dokshin, Gueorgi Kossinets and Geri Gay at Cornell University, and Marc Smith from Connected Action.

The paper pdf pre-print is available here: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~welser/Welser.Cosley.plus.Wiki.Roles.pdf

The link to the ACM abstract and pdf: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940778&CFID=9933318&CFTOKEN=58981138

Abstract: This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and social networkers. Patterns in edit histories and egocentric network visualizations suggest potential “structural signatures” that could be used as quantitative indicators of role adoption. Using simple metrics based on edit histories we compare two samples of Wikipedians: a collection of long term dedicated editors, and a cohort of editors from a one month window of new arrivals. According to these metrics, we find that the proportions of editor types in the new cohort are similar those observed in the sample of dedicated contributors. The number of new editors playing helpful roles in a single month’s cohort nearly equal the number found in the dedicated sample. This suggests that informal socialization has the potential provide sufficient role related labor despite growth and change in Wikipedia. These results are preliminary, and we describe several ways that the method can be improved, including the expansion and refinement of role signatures and identification of other important social roles.

July 6th to July 13th, 2011 – Web Science Trust Graduate Summer School, DERI, NUI Galway Ireland

24AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Web Science Doctoral Summer School 2011

I will be attending and speaking at the upcoming 2011 Web Science Trust Graduate Summer School tobe held at DERI, NUI Galway Ireland from July 6th to July 13th, 2011. I will speak about social media network analysis and run a workshop on using NodeXL. There is a packed schedule featuring a great group of researchers who are gathering at the event, including:

* Prof. Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences.
* Prof. Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
* Prof. Stefan Decker is a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute.
* Dr. Harith Alani is a senior lecturer at the Knowledge Media Institute, where he is heading a group specialising in Social Semantics.
* Dr. Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He specializes in novel methods for online data capture and analysis, especially via social media.
* Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick has a background in physics (AB Princeton, PhD Harvard) and 15 years of developing new technologies at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center before coming to the Hebrew University in 2000.
* Prof. Enric Plaza holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and is Research Professor of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).
* Prof. Steffen Staab is the director of Institute WeST – Web Science and Technologies and of the Institute for Computer Science of the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
* Dr. Derek Greene is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin. As part of the Clique Research Cluster, his focus is on network analysis and community finding, with a particular emphasis on dynamic mobile and social media networks.
* Dr. Michael Hausenblas is a Research Fellow at DERI, NUI Galway, where he leads the Linked Data Research Centre.
* Dr. Daniele Quercia is Horizon researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK). he is interested in computational social science, web science, and social computing.
* Dr. Markus Strohmaier is an Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute, Faculty of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology.

The event is focused on the methods and theories needed to grasp the nature of the social implications of the rapid changes in the technologies of communication and computation:

“The Web is the largest technological artefact in existence, comprising a global network of information sites and services. It is a social machine, delivering information between people and communities, embedded in almost all processes of human society: education, medicine, science and technology, commerce, entertainment and social activity. It is often simply supposed that the Web is a neutral technology, a stable computing platform for the delivery of information and services. What is overlooked is that the Web is changing constantly in response to the demands of human society. Incremental innovations leads to changes in how people use the Web and in turn how Web technology responds to changed human interaction. Small technological decisions influence how individuals use the Web and ripple out to have unanticipated macro-effects. Sometimes these effects are beneficial such as the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Other technologies such as the rise of spam bots or ‘blackhat’ search engine optimisation techniques clutter the Web with irrelevant, distracting information. While influential corporations such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft generate huge revenues from the Web, the Web itself is owned by everyone and no-one. We need to fully understand the demands placed on the Web by human society, so that its fate does not lead to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but to a sustainable technological resource for the future.”

http://webscience.deri.ie/index.html

Setting forth: saving NodeXL option settings – how to exchange your expert configurations in NodeXL

23AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Recently, we’ve been setting out to set up a new way to set the option settings in NodeXL. Now we have added a new feature to NodeXL (v.166): savable, selectable configuration option settings files.

This may seem dull but this feature may have a big impact on the ease of use of NodeXL. This may let the most experienced users of NodeXL share their best practices with the rest of the user community.

Throughout NodeXL you can set a wide range of values, options, and settings. Change the default size of a font in the Graph Options and we record that setting. Map the size of a vertex to a value associated with it in Autofill columns and we record the setting.

Until now, we recorded the settings in several places: some settings went with each workbook, some settings were associated with each machine and stayed on each desktop. The result was that I could create a great network visualization, save and send someone the workbook and they often would not see what I saw when they opened and visualized the network graph. Why? People set their settings in lots of different ways, on different machines, creating potentially vastly different results.

Now, NodeXL will record everything about how a network workbook should be rendered in that workbook.

This now also means that expert users can save their settings for NodeXL and exchange them with other users.

NodeXL now has three places to put settings that should make it more reliable to share a workbook and get the same results on different systems. There will now be a default NodeXL settings file, a per NodeXL workbook settings file (stored in a hidden worksheet in the workbook) and any number of saved settings files. Users can save their settings in each workbook or decide to save the workbook’s custom set of settings to overwrite the default settings file that will be applied to all subsequent NodeXL workbooks. Users can also save their settings to one or more named files, which can be shared with others. Users can import any of these settings files and apply them to an open workbook by selecting NodeXL>Options>Import.

Each NodeXL workbook now has its own set of options. The options are stored right in the workbook, so if you send a workbook to someone else, she’ll be using the same set of options that you did. (“Options” are the selections you make in NodeXL’s dialog boxes, in the NodeXL tab in the Excel Ribbon, and in the toolbar at the top of the graph pane.)
If you like the options you’ve selected in a workbook and you want those options to be used for all new NodeXL workbooks, use NodeXL, Options, Use Current for New in the Ribbon.
You can export a workbook’s options to a separate “options file” that you can send to another NodeXL user or use yourself for other NodeXL workbooks. Use NodeXL, Options, Export.
Import an options file into a workbook using NodeXL, Options, Import. (Known bug, will be fixed in next release: The setting for the Scale slider at the top of the graph pane does not get imported.)
The old “Options” button at the top of the graph pane is now called “Graph Options.”
There is no longer a Background button in NodeXL, Visual Attributes. The graph’s background color and image are now both set via Graph Options.

For those who are running automated collections that then run automated processing of a workbook (see: How to schedule the creation of a network with NodeXL and Windows Task Scheduler) you should note that:

The NodeXL Network Server console program now lets you specify a NodeXL options file to use when a network is saved to a NodeXL workbook. See the NodeXLOptionsFile topic in the SampleNetworkConfiguration.xml file for details. This means that the same machine can be used for scheduled network collection and processing without console users interfering with the settings for automated graphs.

NodeXL (v.166) Keyboard Shortcuts

23AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL now (v.166) offers users a set of keyboard shortcuts that can speed up your routine network layout tasks.

After you click in the graph pane, a number of keyboard shortcuts are now available for functions that had previously been available in the visualization pane’s right-click menu. Now, you can press:

Ctrl+A to select all vertices and edges
Ctrl+V to select all vertices
Ctrl+E to select all edges
Ctrl+D to deselect everything
Ctrl+P to edit the properties of the selected vertices
Ctrl+C to save the graph image to the Windows clipboard
Ctrl+I to save the graph image to a file
Arrow key to move the selected vertices a small distance
Shift+arrow key to move the selected vertices a large distance.

(If you forget a shortcut, most of them are listed in the graph pane’s right-click menu.)

If you have any suggestions for other frequent tasks that could be accelerated with a keyboard command, please contact us on the NodeXL discussion board or here in the comments.

(v.166)

Mapping social networks in Twitter Lists with NodeXL (v.161)

05AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Lists are a recent feature of Twitter which enable users to compile collections of users to follow in a single tweet stream. People can add up to 500 people to follow on a single list. People on a list may be connected to one another if one follows the other.

Some people on a list may have many connections. Some have only a few or even no connections to others on the list.

In version 161 of NodeXL you may now create maps of the connections among a list of Twitter users.

There are two options in this feature. One makes use of the List functions in Twitter. If you request the map for a single twitter list, NodeXL will build a map of the connections among all the people Twitter reports as being on the list. You can create and manage the people on a list using the Twitter list features, or select an existing Twitter list created by other users.

A second option in this feature accepts a list of up to 10,000 twitter user names pasted into the query text box. If you have a list of users and want a map of how they are connected, and the list is not already in Twitter, just paste them here and get a map.

Either way, a connection will be created for every two users if one follows the other.

Here is an example of the network map of the Twitter list of social network analysis people maintained by Valdis Krebs: valdiskrebs\network-analysts

Video: Talk at Personal Digital Archives 2011 at the Internet Archive (24 February 2011)

21MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I gave a talk at the Personal Digital Archives conference held at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, California on 24 February 2011. The videos of the talks at the event are now available from the Internet Archive web site.

Here is a NodeXL map of the connections among the people who tweeted the term PDA2011 OR PDA11:

The top most between people in this graph were: @anarchivist, @blefurgy, @naypinya, @rodanda, @jeffubois, @scottros, @evancaroll, @kevinmarks, @vurayav, and @sshreeves.

Here is the video from my talk:

Group-in-a-box – a new layout option in NodeXL (v.164)

17MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Attractive and well designed network visualization layouts are complex to automate. Many researchers have devoted a great deal of effort to refining algorithms that assign the best set of positions to a set of nodes. In many cases a layout algorithm will work well for some types of graphs and not others. NodeXL has a few network visualization layout algorithms to choose from (Harel-Koren and Fruchterman-Reingold) and we plan to add one or two more in the coming months based on leading new approaches to automated layout.

Today, we release a new NodeXL feature in version .164 that we think will improve the results generated by other layout algorithms: Group Layout. In the Layout Options menu in the NodeXL Network Graph Pane (called “Document Actions” by Excel) you will find that the dialog box has been updated:

Selecting the new “Lay out each of the graph’s groups in its own box and sort the boxes by group size” option and checking the “Show each box’s outline” can generate an image that neatly places each group in a bounded region.

Here we see the set of connections among the people who tweeted the string “msrtf11 OR techfest” – referring to the Microsoft Research TechFest 2011 event that took place in early March in Redmond, Washington. This map clarifies the set of set of relationships among sub-groups within the graph.

Contrast this with the layout created without this feature turned on:

We still have some refinements coming that will improve this layout further (for example, the neat grid of isolated nodes takes an extra step today, we will try to make that happen automatically soon) but this is a nice step in making network graphs easier to understand. Let us know what you think!

Speakers:

Tutorials

Web Science Doctoral Summer School 2011

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