I will attend and speak at a symposium being heldMarch 24-25, 2010 at the IE University Department of Communication in Segovia, Spain.  The topic is: Transnational connections: Challenges and opportunities for communication.

“The Symposium aims to generate discussion on cutting-edge ideas in political communication, encourage international cooperation and unite scholars and practitioners.”

The symposium is organized with Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Organizer and founding Dean of IE School of Communication, Samuel Martín-Barbero notes that the event will gather:

“More than forty international panelists, moderators and speakers (who) will not only reflect on the state of the field, but will also discuss cutting-edge advances in theory, research and practice.”

I will attend along with my colleague John Kelly, from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University and Founder of Morningside Analytics.

Here is the Program, a link to the Registration, and the Twitter stream for the conference.

I will speak about “Analyzing Internet social media: visualizing the social networks in computer networks”:

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 of Internet 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:

[flickrset id=”72157623746194792″ thumbnail=”square”]