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:

Talk at Israel Internet Association on February 22, 2010

11MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Annual Meeting of the Israel Internet Association (http://www.isoc.org.il (English)) was held February 22-23 2010. I spoke at this year’s meeting: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2010/agenda.php?lang=en

Part 1

Part 2The previous year’s conference website is at: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2009/program.php

The Israel Internet Association is the official Israeli Chapter of the Internet Society. Their annual meeting is a central event of academics (sociologists, psychologists, business and law) as well as industry participants from sectors including mobile cellular companies and internet service suppliers.

My talk title: Analyzing Internet social media: visualizing social networks in (mobile) computer networks

Abstract: Social media systems on the Internet are sociologically interesting: why do some online groups succeed where others fail? How do different collections of online media and populations of authors differ from one another? How do patterns of contribution vary and how do these differences illustrate the roles people play within their communities? Several visualizations of patterns of contribution and connection in a range ofInternet social media including web boards, enterprise social networks services, and personal email are presented to illustrate the range of variation among social media repositories and between types of contributors. These images suggest that a more comprehensive overview of social media can generate sociologically relevant findings, improve community management tasks as well as provide features that can improve search and ranking of user generated content. A freely available tool, NodeXL, will be demonstrated to perform basic social media analysis tasks. Extending these tools to include mobile social software (“mososo”) data sets is a major new direction. In the not too distant future, mobile devices will possess a range of sensors and become more “socially aware”. When phones routinely notice each other the nature of social interaction will change dramatically. How will places and locations change when machines become socially aware? In this talk, sociologist Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Connected Action Consulting Group, a provider of social media analysis platforms and services, will describe these new technologies and some ways of thinking about their implications.

Photos from the trip:

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Meeting: Saving Our Present for the Future: Personal Archiving 2010, February 16th at the Internet Archive

12FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will attend an interesting discussion organized by Jeff Ubois on February 16th at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

Saving Our Present for the Future: Personal Archiving 2010

From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial information, vital personal records are becoming digital. At the same time, creation and capture of new digital information has become a part of the daily routine for hundreds of millions of people. But what are the long term prospects for this data?

The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones will be sold in 2010) with the move from older forms of media is reshaping both our personal and collective memories. The size and complexity of personal collections growing, these collections are spread across different media (including film and paper!), and the lines between personal and professional, published and unpublished are being redrawn.

Whether these issues are described as personal archiving, lifestreams, personal digital heritage, preserving digital lives, scrapbooking, or managing intellectual estates, they present major challenges for both individuals and institutions: data loss is a nearly universal experience, whether it is due to hardware failure, obsolescence, user error, lack of institutional support, or any one of many other reasons. Some of these losses may not matter; but the early work of the Nobel prize winners of the 2030s is likely to be digital today, and therefore at risk in ways that previous scientific and literary creations were not. And it isn’t just Nobel winners that matter: the lives of all of us will be preserved in ways not previously possible.

On Tuesday, February 16, the Internet Archive will host a small conference for practitioners in personal digital archiving.

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NodeXL update: v.1.0.110 – New histograms of network metrics on Overall Metrics worksheet

04FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

In the most recent prior release of NodeXL we added new metrics that describe networks in terms of their number of components and the length of paths in those networks. In this release we automate creation of histograms of network metrics. It is useful to see the distribution of attributes like in-degree or betweenness to get a feel for the nature of a network. Building a histogram in Excel is easy, but building seven (one for each of the metrics we create: degree, in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, closeness, eigenvector centrality, and clustering coefficient) is a chore. Doing this repeatedly for several networks is too much work! Now, when you calculate metrics in NodeXL we will create these charts for you and place them on the Overall metrics worksheet.

We will add axis markings and titles soon, making these charts ready to use in a variety of network reports. These histograms will also appear in the Dynamic Filters dialog to guide users as they select segments of the distribution to include or filter out of the displayed network graph.

Other updates:

1.0.1.110 (2010-02-03)

The Overall Metrics worksheet now includes more information about the degree, in-degree, out-degree, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and clustering coefficient metrics when those metrics are computed. The additional information includes the minimum, maximum, average, and median metric values, and a histogram showing the metric value distribution.
The “Convert Old Workbook” item on the NodeXL, Data, Import menu in the Ribbon is now called “Import from NodeXL Workbook Created on Another Computer.” This menu item can be used to work around the following problem: NodeXL workbooks created on a 64-bit Windows computer cannot be opened directly in Excel on a 32-bit Windows computer, and vice-versa. (If you attempt to do so, you will get an error message whose details include “could not find a part of the path.”)
A Clear All Worksheet Columns Now button has been added to the Autofill Columns dialog box (NodeXL, Visual Properties, Autofill). Also, you can now clear an individual worksheet column by clicking a button in the dialog box’s Options column.
Bug fix: On large-font machines, the buttons at the bottom of the Autofill Columns dialog box didn’t fit within the dialog box.
Bug fix: In some circumstances, vertices were drawn below the bottom of the graph pane and were impossible to see. One such circumstance was when the selection was exported to a new workbook (NodeXL, Data, Export, Selection to New NodeXL Workbook). The graph pane in the new workbook acted as if it were taller than its real height, leading to vertices dropping off the bottom.

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