May 1st, 2015 at LSU: NodeXL social media networks talk at the “Telling Stories and Using Visuals for Coastal Environmental Communication” workshop

02MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The National Association of Science Writers has funded a workshop at Louisiana State University, on “Telling Stories and Using Visuals for Coastal Environmental Communication” on Friday, May 1, 2015. I will speak during a session on “Social Media Best Practices and Mapping for Science & Environmental Communication,” to give workshop attendees both theoretical and also a practical tutorial on using NodeXL and mapping social networks in the interest of effective science communication.

More information about the workshop can be found at https://showmethecoast2015.wordpress.com/.

For example, this is a network of connections among people who tweeted about Scientific Communication:

March 30-31, 2015 – Predictive Analytics World San Francisco – Think Link: Connecting to the Power of Social Networks with no Programing with NodeXL

04FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

There will be a one day crash course on all things “big data” at the upcoming San Francisco Predictive Analytics World conference on Monday, March 30th, 2015. Get the Big Data big picture with a day of introduction to the major concepts, methods, challenges, and best practices related to leveraging large volumes of information.

There will be a session on social media network analysis using NodeXL at the conference as well.

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2015/agenda.php#day1-1120b
11:20am-12:05pm

Track 2: Social Data
Think Link: Connecting to the Power of Social Networks with no Programing with NodeXL

Networks are collections of connections — they are everywhere once you start to look. Learn how to collect, analyze, visualize, and publish insights into connected populations. Using the free and open NodeXL addin for Excel, anyone who can make a pie chart can now make a network chart. Create insights into social media, collaboration, organizations, markets, and other connected structures with just a few clicks. Easily publish reports with visualizations and content analysis. Apply social network analysis to your own brands, email, discussions or web sites.

Book: Ways of Knowing in HCI (Kellogg and Olson, editors) Chapter on SNA and HCI

08JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

A new book edited by Wendy Kellogg and Judy Olson is now available. Ways of Knowing in HCI is a collection of chapters on the subject of methods and theories that frame Human Computer Interaction studies.

I co-authored a chapter in the book with Professor Derek Hansen from Brigham Young University on the role social network analysis can play in Human Computer Interaction.

: A social network consisting of Twitter users (nodes) who have Tweeted the word “global warming” connected to one another based on Follow, Reply, or Mention relationships (edges). Nodes are assigned different colors based on clusters. Hubs with many followers are indicated by size.

The chapter outline:

Introduction

A Brief History of Social Network Analysis

Social Network Analysis and Human-Computer Interaction

Goals of Social Network Analysis for HCI Researchers and Practitioners

1) Inform the design and implementation of new CSCW systems
2) Understand and improve current CSCW systems
3) Evaluate impact of CSCW system on social relationships
4) Design novel CSCW systems and features using SNA methods
5) Answer fundamental social science questions

Social Network Analysis Questions

Questions about Individual Social Actors
Questions about Overall Network Structure
Questions about Network Dynamics and Flows

Performing Social Network Analysis

Identify Goals & Research Questions
Collect Data
Sources of Network Data
Types of Social Networks
Representing Network Data

Three ways of representing network data

How to Analyze and Visualize Data
Network Analysis Tools
Commonly Used Network Analysis and Visualization Tools

Node-Specific Metrics: Focusing on the Trees

Common Centrality Metrics

Aggregate Network Metrics: Focusing on the Forest

Common Aggregate Network Metrics

Network Clusters & Motifs: Focusing on the Thickets

Network Dynamics and Information Flow

What Constitutes Good Work

References

Social Media Clarity Podcast E05: Crowdsourcing, Volunteers, and the Sharing Economy

14OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The 5th episode of the Social Media Clarity Podcast is now out:

Crowdsourcing, Volunteers, and the Sharing Economy

In this episode host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) and I talk with new co-host Scott Moore (@scottmoore) about the promise and pitfalls of crowdsourcing.

We conclude that pixels, not pennies, may be the best currency to create incentives to create quality content.

ThreadMill 0.1: Social Accounting for Message Thread Collections

16OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Social Media Research Foundation is pleased to announce the immediate availability of ThreadMill 0.1. ThreadMill is a free and open application that consumes message thread data and produces reports about each author, thread, forum, and board along with visualizations of the patterns of connection and activity. ThreadMill is written in Ruby, and depends on MongoDB, SinatraRB, HAML, and Flash to collect, analyze, and report data about collections of conversation threads.

Threaded conversations are a major form of social media. Message boards, email and email lists, twitter, blog comments, text messages, and discussion forums are all social media systems built around the message thread data structure. As messages are exchanged through these systems, some messages are sent as a reply to a particular previous message. As messages are sent in reply to prior messages, chains of messages form. Message chains come in two major forms: branching and non-branching. Branching threads are those that allow more than one message to reply to a prior message. Non-branching threads are single chains, like a string of pearls, that allow only one message to reply to a prior message. Many web based message boards are non-branching. Many email systems and discussion forums are branching.

ThreadMill requires a minimal set of data elements to generate its reports. A data table must minimally have a column of information for each message that includes the name of the message board, the forum, the thread, and the author, along with a unique identifier for each message and the date and time it was posted. Optional data elements include the unique identifier of the message being replied to, the URL of the message, and the URL for a profile photo.

All forms of threaded message exchange can be measured. Simple measures like the count of the number of messages or the number of authors are obvious and useful. Other measures can be created from more sophisticated analysis. For example, the network of connections that forms as different authors reply to one another can be extracted and analyzed using network analysis methods. It is possible to calculate metrics from these networks of reply that describe the location of each person in the graph.

ThreadMill generates several data sets that can be used to create visualizations of the activity and structure of a message board collection.

A Treemap data set can illustrate the hierarchy of encapsulated authors within threads, threads within fora, fora within boards, and boards within collections. Treemap visualizations of collections of threaded conversations can quickly highlight the most active or populous discussions.

An AuthorLine visualization takes the form of a double histogram, with bubbles representing each thread active in each time period sized by the volume of messages the author contributed, sorted by size. Threads that have been initiated by the author are represented as bubbles above the center line. Messages that the author contributes to threads started by other authors are represented as bubbles stacked below the center line. AuthorLines quickly reveal the pattern of activity an author displays and identifies which of several types of contributors the author is.

A scatter plot visualization represents each author as a bubble in an X-Y space defined by the number of different days the author was active against the average number of messages the author contributes to the threads in which they participate.

A time series line chart reveals the days of maximum and minimum activity along with trends.

A network diagram reveals the overall structure of the discussion space and the people who occupy strategic locations within the network graph.

ThreadMill has received generous assistance from Morningside Analytics. Bruce Woodson implemented ThreadMill.

Webshop 2011 review: 4 days, 20 talks, 45 students, an earthquake, a hurricane and many new connections

25SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

Eventful. The 2011 Webshop at the University of Maryland was certainly that with both an earthquake and a hurricane to mark the start and end of the event. We really moved heaven and earth at this workshop.

In 4 days, 20 talks, 45 students, an earthquake, a hurricane and many new connections – the Webshop touched on a set of related concepts, methods, and findings about ways to use communication and computation technology to help groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations work collectively towards common goals.

Several years ago a program at the University of Maryland called “Webshop” (Web Workshop) was organized by Professor John Robinson and held for three consecutive Summers. I visited and spoke at two of these events and know many people who attended or spoke at one or more and remember the event enthusiastically. The students who attended include some of the now leading researchers in the field of social science studies of the internet. There is an impressive alumni list.

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since. Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad,FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run. Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind. A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

After many years of inactivity, the Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) happened again! With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, on August 23-26, 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students heard and engaged with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives. Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event gathered students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies. Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines applied to attend the 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). The workshop explored the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety. The workshop attracted graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

–

Organizers

Alan Neustadtl (@smilex3md) – Sociology, University of Maryland
Jennifer Preece (@jenpre) – iSchool, University of Maryland
Marc Smith(@Marc_Smith) – Social Media Research Foundation
Ben Shneiderman (@benbendc) – Computer Science, University of Maryland
PJ Rey (@pjrey) – Sociology, University of Maryland, Student Coordinator

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Photos

[flickrset id=”72157627509211294″ thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”small”]

The Social Media Research Foundation – Slides

19SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Social Media Research Foundation is dedicated to Open Tools, Open Data, and Open Scholarship.

These slides provide an overview of the goals and accomplishments of the Social Media Research Foundation:

20110830 Introducing the Social Media Research Foundation

View more presentations from Marc Smith

23-26 August 2011 – Summer Social Webshop (Webshop 2.0) – The return of a great tradition

10JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since. Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad, FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run. Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind. A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

The Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) is happening again! With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, this August 23-26 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students will hear and engage with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives. Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event will gather students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies. Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines are invited to apply to attend this summer’s 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). The workshop explores the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety. The workshop should be of interest to graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

For more information, please contact Alan Neustadtl (alan.neustadtl@gmail.com).

–

Photos

[flickrset id=”72157627509211294″ thumbnail=”thumbnail” photos=”” overlay=”true” size=”small”]

iConference 2011 Wiki roles paper awarded best paper – University of Washington, Seattle, WA

24AprMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

http://www.ischools.org/iConference11/2011index/

Our paper, Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia, about the variety of roles people perform in Wikis received the best paper award (along with 4 others) in a field of 86 papers. The 2011 iConference accepted 86 papers, and had about 550 attendees.

The paper is authored by: Howard T. Welser at Ohio University, Austin Lin at Cornell University and Microsoft, Dan Cosley, Fedor Dokshin, Gueorgi Kossinets and Geri Gay at Cornell University, and Marc Smith from Connected Action.

The paper pdf pre-print is available here: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~welser/Welser.Cosley.plus.Wiki.Roles.pdf

The link to the ACM abstract and pdf: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940778&CFID=9933318&CFTOKEN=58981138

Abstract: This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and social networkers. Patterns in edit histories and egocentric network visualizations suggest potential “structural signatures” that could be used as quantitative indicators of role adoption. Using simple metrics based on edit histories we compare two samples of Wikipedians: a collection of long term dedicated editors, and a cohort of editors from a one month window of new arrivals. According to these metrics, we find that the proportions of editor types in the new cohort are similar those observed in the sample of dedicated contributors. The number of new editors playing helpful roles in a single month’s cohort nearly equal the number found in the dedicated sample. This suggests that informal socialization has the potential provide sufficient role related labor despite growth and change in Wikipedia. These results are preliminary, and we describe several ways that the method can be improved, including the expansion and refinement of role signatures and identification of other important social roles.

March 14-15, 2011 – Talk at Predictive Analytics World – San Francisco – Social Data: Advanced Methods – Social (Media) Network Analysis with NodeXL

14MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will be speaking at the next Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco– March 14-15, 2011 about measuring and mapping social media networks with NodeXL:

Social Data: Advanced Methods – Social (Media) Network Analysis with NodeXL
www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2011/agenda.php#day2-13a

Networks are the common data structure that unify the otherwise diverse range of social media services. In this session learn how to extract social networks from various social media systems and analyze and visualize the structures found in collections of connections. Learn to use the free and open NodeXL add-in for Excel 2007/2010 to analyze email, twitter, facebook, youtube, www, flickr, and wiki networks.

Here is an example – a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the string “#pawcon”.

Connections among the Twitter users who recently mentioned PAWCON when queried on March 14, 2011 including tweets from the period 3/10/2011 15:13 to 3/15/2011 3:51, scaled by numbers of followers.
NodeXL is available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

The top most between contributors were: @tapan_patel, @jamet123, @zementis, @pawcon, @ibmspss, @sasanalytics, @kristinevick, @waynettetubbs, @dataspora, @inside_r

Organizers

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