A recent paper “EventGraphs: Charting Collections of Conference Connections” by Marc Smith from Connected Action, Professor Derek Hansen (College of Information Studies) and Professor Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction Lab) both from the University of Maryland and has been accepted for publication at the 2011 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Conference. This is the 44th year for the conference. Derek Hansen presented the paper on January 7, 2011.
Hansen, D., Smith, M., Shneiderman, B., EventGraphs: charting collections of conference connections. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Forty-Forth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). January 4-7, 2011. Kauai, Hawaii.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reports-search.php?number=2010-13
Our paper is about visualizing social media and it describes the visualization of the patterns of connections formed when people tweet about events like conferences and news stories.
EventGraphs are social media network diagrams constructed from content selected by its association with time-bounded events, such as conferences. Many conferences now communicate a common “hashtag” or keyword to identify messages related to the event. EventGraphs help make sense of the collections of connections that form when people follow, reply or mention one another and a keyword. This paper defines EventGraphs, characterizes different types, and shows how the social media network analysis add-in NodeXL supports their creation and analysis. The paper also identifies the structural and conversational patterns to look for and highlight in EventGraphs and provides design ideas for their improvement.
A collection of EventGraphs are available in flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157625618025980/
The EventGraph for HICSS this year is here: 20110109-NodeXL-Twitter-HICSS
The top most between contributors to the HICSS Twitter graph this year are: @arcticpenguin @avantgame @barrywellman @clifflampe @dalprof @chandlerism @shakmatt @marc_smith @shen045 and @thecatandthekey
Here is the data set: 20110109-NodeXL-Twitter-HICSS
Graph Metric Value
Graph Type Directed
Vertices 92
Unique Edges 243
Edges With Duplicates 71
Total Edges 314
Self-Loops 0
Connected Components 21
Single-Vertex Connected Components 18
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 69
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 307
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 8
Average Geodesic Distance 3.081693
Graph Density 0.032967033
NodeXL Version 1.0.1.159
An article about social media visualization Social Seen: Analyzing and Visualizing Data from Social Networks by Hunter Whitney, appeared in UX Magazine on December 15, 2010. It provides a great round up of tools and approaches to mapping populations in social media spaces.
Previous HICSS papers:
Gleave, Eric, Howard T. Welser, Marc Smith, and Thomas Lento. 2009. “A conceptual and operational definition of social role in online community.” In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), January 5-8. Computer Society Press. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Mini-Track)
Fisher, D., Smith, M., and Welser, H. You Are Who You Talk To, Proceedings of HICSS, January 2006. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Program)
Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. “Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces“, Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004. (Best Paper: Persistent Conversation Minitrack)
Here are some sample event graphs:
[flickrset id=”72157625618025980″ thumbnail=”square”]