Social Media Clarity Podcast – E03 – Real Names for Social Order? Guest: Dr. Bernie Hogan (@blurky)

16SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Social Media Clarity Podcast has just released a new episode:

Save our Pseudonyms! Social Media Clarity S01E03

This is the “Real Names for Social Order?” episode, featuring guest sociologist: Dr. Bernie Hogan (@blurky) from the Oxford Internet Institute speaking with host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) along with me & Bryce Glass (@bryceglass).

Building on the second episode which focused on the changes at the Huffington Post’s comment posting policy, in episode 3 we talk with Bernie Hogan who explains why sociologists are concerned by “context collapse” – the loss of the ability to be different people for different people – caused by social media. Sociological research suggests this is not a positive thing because humans have always maintained different roles for different groups of people and not all roles are commensurate. While time and place once kept separate roles separate, today the net makes any interaction into every interaction.

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Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis

21AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

My colleague George Barnett has edited the Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis.

I contributed four entries with co-authors:

WWW Hyperlink Networks

with Robert Ackland, Australian National University

Email networks

with Derek Hansen, Brigham Young University

Blog networks

with John Kelly, Morningside Analytics, Harvard Berkman Center

Facebook networks

with Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Description:

This two-volume encyclopedia provides a thorough introduction to the wide-ranging, fast-developing field of social networking, a much-needed resource at a time when new social networks or “communities” seem to spring up on the internet every day. Social networks, or groupings of individuals tied by one or more specific types of interests or interdependencies ranging from likes and dislikes, or disease transmission to the “old boy” network or overlapping circles of friends, have been in existence for longer than services such as Facebook or YouTube; analysis of these networks emphasizes the relationships within the network. The Encyclopedia of Social Networks offers comprehensive coverage of the theory and research within the social sciences that has sprung from the analysis of such groupings, with accompanying definitions, measures, and research.

Featuring approximately 350 signed entries, along with approximately 40 media clips, organized alphabetically and offering cross-references and suggestions for further readings, this encyclopedia opens with a thematic reader’s guide in the front that groups related entries by topics. A chronology offers the reader historical perspective on the study of social networks. This two-volume reference work is a must-have resource for libraries serving researchers interested in the various fields related to social networks, including sociology, social psychology and communication and media studies.

SocialnetImporter for NodeXL: Import your Facebook ego-networks

10OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Social Network Importer for NodeXL is a new graph data provider for NodeXL which enables each user to directly download and import their Facebook networks into NodeXL. With this release, you can now download your own Facebook ego-network for analysis and visualization in NodeXL and other network analysis tools that can import GraphML. Future releases will extract networks from Fan Pages and Groups.

The code is open and free and can be found on the CodePlex site here: http://socialnetimporter.codeplex.com/

The new Social Network Importer for NodeXL provides a new data import menu option that can be configured with this dialog box:

Social Network Importer for NodeXL v.1.1

Using the SocialNetImporter data provider can provide data that can be represented as a network visualization:

How to install the Social Network Importer for NodeXL: Continue reading →

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

Bernie Hogan’s Facebook Social Network Data Provider and Visualization toolkit

25AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

My colleague at the Oxford Internet Institute, Bernie Hogan, is working on tools that collect personal Facebook network data and visualize the connections among your friends. These tools now interoperate with NodeXL through the GraphML XML file format. Here is the new link: http://namegen.oii.ox.ac.uk/fb/downloadNet.php?type=graphml

Here is an example: http://twitpic.com/9rvfq

It provides a good illustration of the ways a person’s social network is clumped into clusters built around life phases, workplaces, educational institutions, teams and locations. As people move through more of these stages of life during the Facebook era (and often before) they accumulate these clusters.

Facebook or other contact and friend management systems might could leverage this clustering to organize the presentation of contact information streams.

Bernie recently announced on the SOCNET list that he has updated his script for downloading your Facebook network.

“Features:

1. Its faster. (Presently orders of magnitude faster than Nexus, Touchgraph or ORA).
2. It gives nice feedback during the download.
3. It has less bugs!
4. It gives you the output as a file you can right-click and save rather than copy-paste.
5. IDs are names.”

Bernie writes that phase two of his project is underway.

Bernie is planning a demo at the Sunbelt social network analysis conference in Italy in 2010.

Bernie is the author of the Facebook chapter in our forthcoming book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world available from Morgan-Kaufmann in July 2010.