A new paper on visualizing social media has been released on the University of Maryland, Human Computer Interaction Laboratory tech report archive.  Co-authored by Derek Hansen,  myself, and Ben Shneiderman, the paper describes and visualizes the patterns of connections formed when people tweet about events like conferences and news stories.

EventGraphs_2010_HCIL_Tech_Report

http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reports-search.php?number=2010-13

Hansen, D., Smith, M., Shneiderman, B.
EventGraphs: Charting Collections of Conference Connections
HCIL-2010-13

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.