9 August 2011 – Social Media SNA Workshop – Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (http://www.aejmc.com/)

31JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

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.

2011 State of the Union: Mapping the connections among Twitter users who tweet about SOTU

22JanMay 7, 2015 By admin

The United States State of the Union address this year will be held Tuesday evening, 25 January 2011.

The event is a globally visible opportunity for the President of the United States to present the Administration’s vision for its agenda for the year to the people of the US and the world.

The hashtag #stateoftheunion is already very active in Twitter.

This is a NodeXL map of the connections among people who recently tweeted the string “stateoftheunion” on 21 January, 2011.

The most between user, @keitholbermann, is highlighted. Two major clusters emerge, shown arbitrarily here as green and blue, and which are more clearly seen in the filtered graph below the list.

Summary network statistics:

Graph Type Directed
Vertices 1259
Unique Edges 8014
Edges With Duplicates 544
Total Edges 8558
Connected Components 306
Single-Vertex Connected Components 293
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 937
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 8513
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 9
Average Geodesic Distance 3.140191
Graph Density 0.00522786

The most “between” contributors in the network are:

@keitholbermann, @borowitzreport, @thefix, @katyinindy,
@america1first, @wbconservative, @westwingreport, @dailykos,
@writer2go, and @gottalaff

When contributors with low “betweenness” are filtered out of the graph, two dominant clusters become easier to discern. To the left are supporters of the President and to the right are those critical of the Administration. A representative tweet from this cluster is highlighted.

New NodeXL Network Server (v1.0.1.126) – Frequently Asked Questions

14JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL Network Server Frequently Asked Questions

The NodeXL team has released a new version (v.1.0.1.126) with better support for collecting data from social media network sources, starting with Twitter. The NodeXL Network Server program now ships in every NodeXL installation. Tony, the lead developer on the team, created the following FAQ to explain how to use the collector application.

This document describes how the NodeXL Network Server works.

What is the NodeXL Network Server?

It’s a Windows command-line program that downloads a network from Twitter and stores the network on disk in several file formats. It can be run directly from a command line, but is typically scheduled to run on a periodic basis via the Task Scheduler that is built into Windows.

Where can the files be found?

The files are in NodeXL’s program folder. To find out where the folder is, right-click the Microsoft NodeXL, Excel 2007 Template menu item in the Windows Start menu, then select Properties. On 32-bit English computers, the folder is “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Microsoft NodeXL Excel Template.”

Who are its intended users?

The Server is meant for use by people with moderate system administration skills. It is not difficult to use, but it is not intended for the same audience as the NodeXL Excel Template, where ease of use is of high priority.

How do you run the Server from the Windows command line?

Like this:

NodeXLNetworkServer.exe NetworkConfiguration.xml

The program takes a single argument, which is the path to a configuration file that specifies which network should be downloaded and how the network should be saved to disk. A particular configuration file might specify “Get the Twitter search network for people whose tweets contain ‘Sociology,’ add an edge for each ‘mentions’ relationship, limit to 100 people, include tweets, include statistics, and store the network as a GraphML file in the C:\NodeXLNetworks folder.”

The program immediately gets the requested network, saves it to disk, and exits. On its own, it does not run on a periodic basis.

How do I create a configuration file?

You create a configuration file by copying a provided template file and editing the copy in Notepad. The template file is named SampleNetworkConfiguration.xml and is stored in the same folder as the program. The file is in XML format and the XML tags are clearly named and documented.

In what file formats can be the network be saved to disk?

You can save the network to either GraphML, which can be imported into a NodeXL workbook; directly to a NodeXL workbook; or both.

Do you typically run the program from the command line?

No. Instead, you typically run it as a scheduled task via a built-in Windows program called Task Scheduler

Task Scheduler is a powerful utility that lets your run any program, including NodeXL Network Server, on a periodic basis. You can, for example, tell Task Scheduler to run NodeXL Network Server using a particular network configuration file every twelve hours starting June 1, 2010 and ending June 30, 2010; or once a week starting now and continuing forever. The scheduling options are endless.

Why not just include scheduling features in the NodeXL Network Server?

For two reasons. First, Task Scheduler’s extensive scheduling options would be difficult to duplicate. Second, if NodeXL Network Server had to download a network on a periodic basis, it would have to run as a Windows service, and Windows services are more complex to implement and to use than a simple command-line program.

How are the network files named?

Scheduling the NodeXL Network Server to run periodically can create any number of network files in the specified directory, so a file-naming scheme is needed. The file name format is

{NetworkConfigFileName}_{Date}_{Time}.{Extension}.

So the above example, in which NetworkConfiguration.xml specifies that networks are to be saved as GraphML, might create a set of network files that look like this:

NetworkConfiguration_2010-06-01_02-00-00.graphml
NetworkConfiguration_2010-06-01_14-00-00. graphml
NetworkConfiguration_2010-06-02_02-00-00. graphml
…

What happens if the computer is not turned on at the scheduled time?

By default, the task won’t be performed until the next scheduled time when the computer is turned on. However, if the computer is sleeping, you can tell Task Scheduler to wake it at the scheduled time to run the task.

What happens if the NodeXL Network Server encounters an error?

If the error prevents the network from being downloaded, the NodeXL Network Server creates an error file instead of a network file. The file name starts with “Error” to make it easy to spot:

Error_NetworkConfiguration_2010-06-02_14-00-00.txt

The error file contains the details of what went wrong.

If one or more errors block part of the network but other parts of the network are successfully downloaded, then the NodeXL Network Server creates the network file containing the partial network, along with a text file that explains how many errors occurred. The text file name starts with “PartialNetworkInfo” to make it easy to spot:

NetworkConfiguration_2010-06-02_14-00-00.Graphml
PartialNetworkInfo_NetworkConfiguration_Date.txt

What if I want to periodically download more than one network?

Simply schedule more than one task, each using a different network configuration file. The tasks are independent of one another and can be scheduled to run at different times.

Mapping #e2 OR #e2conf connections in Twitter with NodeXL

13JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Enterprise 2.0 conference is about to get underway in Boston. The event focuses on all the ways social media tools that are familiar on the consumer Internet are making their way behind the firewall in many enterprises and institutions. Why can’t you “friend” a colleague or “like” a spreadsheet or slide deck? Employees often come to their jobs expecting tools that resemble the social media tools with which they already spend much of their time.

Like many conferences, this one has a hashtag, actually two that I know of: #e2 and #e2conf. There is already a good deal of activity leading up to the event. Here is a map of connections among a group of people who mentioned either #e2 or #e2conf in the last few days.

In this map there are 532 Vertices and 9,395 Unique Edges, creating 13 Connected Components, 11 of which had only a Single-Vertex, the largest component had 519 vertices which were interconnected 9,393 times. The small number of isolated components indicates that this is a cohesive community of highly connected participants. These people know and follow, reply and mention one another. The Graph had a Density of 0.03 and the Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) was 5 steps with an Average Geodesic Distance of 2.

Within this mass of connected users is a core group of highly “between” people, those who most broadly span connections within the population. These are one possible set of “influentials” within the Enterprise 2.0 community.

Here is a two screen view of the list of the top most between #e2 OR #e2conf mentioning twitter users along with the overview graph of their internal linkages.

A closer look at the graph alone can reveal enough detail to read the names of these central participants.

This is a view of the list of authors sorted in Excel by their “Betweenness centrality” score, the measure of how much these people “bridge” across the network.

An alternative view plots these contributors in an X/Y space based on their count of followers (along the x axis) and count of tweets (along the y axis).

The top 15 are:

dhinchcliffe
jowyang
rlavigne42
enterprise20
jumpersearch
marciamarcia
itsinsider
cmswatch
philcampos
rwang0
dankeldsen
lliu
juliancaparaz
lehawes
sameerpatel

Twitter users who mentioned #e2 or #e2conf on June 13, 2010 scaled by number of followers, x = log(followers), y = log(tweets).

There is a correlation between tweets and followers, but not everyone converts tweets to followers at the same rate. Below the diagonal are those who over convert tweets to followers, those above the diagonal under convert tweets to followers.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is forthcoming summer 2010 from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.

Node and Venn: NodeXL can create Venn Diagrams!

27JanMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL updated starting with version 1.05 with features that make it fairly easy to create basic “Venn Diagrams”. A Venn diagram is a familiar way to illustrate the overlap (or lack thereof) of two or more “sets” of things.

There are some very amusing Venn diagrams out there! This one in particular made me laugh but I may be dating myself.

The Venn diagram feature is a special request from the Microsoft Biological Foundation group.

A Venn is related to but different from an Euler diagram. An “n-Venn” diagram is a collection of closed curves (“circles”) on a plane where all the circles intersect. A “simple” Venn diagram has just two circles but complex diagrams can have more. A 2 circle Venn diagram has 3 regions (A, B, A+B) and a 3 circle Venn diagram has 7 regions (A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, ABC).

A Survey of Venn Diagrams can be found at http://www.combinatorics.org/Surveys/ds5/VennEJC.html.

Our implementation is a bit of a hack, we basically let you define the X/Y location of 3 circles. A richer Venn tool would make it easy to take set data and define these circles. We may get that implemented in the coming months.

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