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.”

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

Fully automatic: NodeXL can build your network graphs hands free

12SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

In many cases I look at a network graph and apply a series of operations to transform it into a more presentable form. For example, I often calculate graph metrics, use Autofill columns to map data to display attributes like size, color, or shape, create clusters, sub-graph images, and then select the Harel-Koren layout and select the options so that small components get lined up in neat rows at the bottom of the graph. I like the edges to be gray and partially transparent. I often set the font size to a large 24 points because I scale the graph to about 10% of its full size to reduce occlusion.

Carrying out each of these operations once is no problem. Repeat 100 times and there is a problem.

The NodeXL team completed another phase of our automation feature, allowing users to build a refined graph with any set of configuration that can be applied to any number of other networks.

Along with the automated collection system, NodeXL can now generate a regular stream of network graphs from social media sources.

July 26-30 – Catalyst 2010 conference – Social Networks in the Enterprise

29JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I spoke at the 2010 Catalyst Conference in San Diego on July 29th. The conference hashtag is #CAT10.

The slides are here:

2010 Catalyst Conference – Trends in Social Network Analysis

View more presentations from Marc Smith.

A few days before the conference started the #CAT10 twitter social network map looked like this:

26 July 2010 NodeXL Twitter map of the connections among people who tweet “#CAT10” the hashtag for this year’s Catalyst conference.

This is the list of the most “between” contributors in the #CAT10 Twitter graph on July 26, 2010.

A few days later, as people began to arrive at the conference, the graph became far more dense and populous.

The network of #CAT10 mentioning users in Twitter has become much more dense, with more people and more connections among them as people reply, retweet, follow, and mention one another.

While the core people in this list are similar to the list generated a few days earlier, several people have shifted position.

Filtering the graph, we can remove all but the most between people to reveal the core members of the community.

These people are likely to play an influential role in the #CAT10 community.

July 12-13, 2010: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Redmond, WA

08JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Faculty Summit

The 2010 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held July 12 and 13 in Redmond, Washington. Among the many panels and discussions related to the state of computer science the NodeXL team had several representatives talking about the ways network science education can be expanded using an easy to use application for network analysis built on Excel.

Jimmy Lin from the University of Maryland also attended to speak about programming in the cloud.

Here is the abstract for the NodeXL talk:

NodeXL – Social Network Analysis in Excel—Natasa Milic Frayling, Microsoft Research; Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland; Marc Smith, Connected Action

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft’s NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools—NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization into a simple tool anyone can use. This makes NodeXL of interest not only to end-users but also to researchers and students studying visual and network analytics and their application in the real world. NodeXL has the unique feature that it imports networks from Outlook email, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, WWW, and other sources, plus it offers a rich set of metrics, layouts, and clustering algorithms. This talk will describe NodeXL and our efforts to start the Social Media Research Foundation.

Some photos from the event:

Saul Greenberg

Ben Shneiderman and Andy van Dam

Ben Shneiderman, Natasa Milic-Frayling and Marc Smith

Tom McMail and Marc Smith

Automatic for the people (who use the latest NodeXL!). Release v.1.0.1.128

08JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The NodeXL team has just released a new version (v.1.0.1.128) that contains a new “Automation” feature that allows users to define a collection of operations to perform on their network graphs and invoke the complete set in a single button click AND reuse that configuration on other workbook graphs. In fact, the feature will apply the configuration you define to all the files you specify, allowing easy processing of large collections of network data sets.

This week the feature is partially complete. Users can invoke the merge duplicate edges, calculate graph metrics, auto-fill columns, create sub-graph images, find clusters and show graph. These operations can require as many as dozens of clicks when performed manually. If you have dozens or hundreds of network data sets the result is a daunting case of repetitive strain injury and carpal tunnel syndrome. Instead, with automation, these operations can be carried out orders of magnitude more frequently without much pain!

The next release will feature the complete package which will then include control over the layout and graph options. As a result, automatically generated network visualizations can be produced in a pipeline: users will be able to specify a query using the NodeXL desktop network data collector and then automate the processing of large collections of data sets.

The result should be better analysis of time series data sets that have many “slices”. The feature points the way to additional development work for supporting the comparison between networks to evaluate their evolution.

The REM album “Automatic for the people” takes its title from the motto of Athens, Georgia, eatery Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods.

Mapping the connections among people who tweet #sunbelt

03JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA).

This year’s INSNA “Sunbelt” conference is at the Riva del Garda Fierecongressi, Trento, Italy! Here is the 2010 INSNA Sunbelt Program.

This is the NodeXL map of connections among people who tweeted the hashtag used for the conference “#sunbelt”.

Having now seen several of these maps for other topics and events (see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/) this map can be placed in context. It is a small group, but has a high density of connections. It lacks isolates, the people who say the term but do not connect to others who say that term. This means that this is a very “in-group” population: if you know to use the #sunbelt hashtag, you probably connect to someone else who uses the term. It is a single major cluster of connected people, no obvious sub-graphs or clusters are visible. Not everyone is central in the graph, and those who are have a prominent role in the network science community. Here is the top ten list of #sunbelt mentioning twitter users ranked by betweeness centrality.

miriamnotten
barrywellman
memeticbrand
isidromj
drewconway
gephi
kristtina
danevans87
valdiskrebs
ciro

July Catalyst Conference on Enterprise Social Media in San Diego

12SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Catalyst Conference was July 27-31 in San Diego which gathered many people to discuss new technologies for enterprise computing.
On Wednesday, July 29 at 11:15 a.m. I gave a presentation about the use of social network analysis within the enterprise.

2009 – Social Media Analystics Research and Tools

View more presentations from Marc Smith.

Session Details: Social Network Analysis: A New Source Of Business Intelligence

Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group with Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist

Where do people go when they need subject-matter expertise? How do you discover someone in your company who knows someone in a firm you’re trying to sell products and services into? Who is the person everyone goes to when they need to find out what’s really going on? Such relationships within organizations have been difficult to identify and leverage because they are often invisible to those outside people’s informal and personal networks. Technology has compounded the problem by fragmenting interactions between people across a multitude of tools. The advent of social networking sites within the enterprise (e.g., a “Corporate Facebook”) has triggered a resurgence of interest in the visualization and analysis of relationship structures. Social network analysis represents a new source of insight that aids a variety of business activities. It can also reveal interaction patterns and relationship structures that help strategists improve organizational effectiveness. As social networks gain increased adoption, numerous issues arise:

• How should relationship data be leveraged? What are the applications?
• Who conducts this type of work – do IT organizations have the skills?
• Will identifying “social roles” become a key component of organizational development and management practices? What are the privacy concerns?

In this session, Marc Smith will outline SNA trends and discuss real-world examples with Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group.

Some tweets from the talk:

Spesh00: I think Marc Smith just completely validated my prior statement about leveraging my social score against my knowledge tags. #catalyst09
atownley: Moving discussions for internal use from email to messageboards, etc. to segregate personal/corp data – Marc Smith #smchat #catalyst09
aewang: Chief Social Scientist (Marc Smith) – what a cool title! #catalyst09
aewang: Love Marc Smith‘s comment about ascribing status vs. achieving status. achieving hard to do w/o social media #catalyst09
atownley: Very interesting presentation from Marc Smith of Telligent on social analytics of many different sources for “networks” #smchat #catalyst09
aewang: Interesting presentation from Marc Smith @Telligent on social analytics #catalyst09
Spesh00: NodeXL – Free program for Social Analytics.. Looks slick as all get out. #catalyst09
Spesh00: Social Network Analysis from Mike Gotta and Marc Smith. I wanna be the “Discussion Person”… #catalyst09

There were several notable points made during presentations that captured my attention:

Social Media platforms are seen as meta identity servers. Where LDAP and AD are not end user editable (usually), social media allows self-annotation AND annotation on others.
Metrics in enterprise social media can be applied to assess how much an organization is isolated in silos: compartmentalized enterprises have few links across organizations.
Issues with employees who leave (and might someday return) – how to keep the information while freezing the identity.
Identity Management is a major area: lots of talk about “ascribed” roles (you are a person who can approve payments) versus “achieved” roles (you start behaving like an Answer Person).
Identity leakage and diffusion: what happens when internal profile data gets outside or outside social media gets pulled internally? If content is created on employee owned device and on personal time is it owned by the corporation?
Citrix embraces employee provisioned hardware: provides $2,100 to employees to buy a laptop that meets or exceeds corporate requirements. They own it and take it with them if/when they leave.
Booz Allen Hamilton embraces internal social media, demonstrates value to organization versus “free and public” sites. Will onboard 5K NEW EMPLOYEES this year! Need to integrate new people fast!

Speakers:

Tutorials

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