The network created by "Who follows who among the people who tweeted "#CHI2010". Node size is proportional to total tweets. Generated with NodeXL On October 29th, I will be offering a workshop in Mountain View, California on the application of…
A recent paper makes use of NodeXL to create illustrations of data from connections among twitter users drawn from the United States presidential debates in October 2008. One illustration highlights the major clusters in the network. Tweet the Debates: Understanding…
This weekend is the Social Computing 2009 conference in Vancouver, B.C. It is a gathering of many people doing research on social media useage. Many papers are about tagging systems, blogs, wikis, message boards, and social networking services. [flickrset id="72157622064119361"…
Social media and virtual worlds offer two important frontiers for measuring earned engagement. In both, audiences are actively engaged as participants. This workshop covered foundational concepts in media measurement, describe new frontiers in measuring audience engagement in social media and virtual worlds, and provided hands-on experience in using new analytical tools.
This session also provided a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL, including generation of social networks from social media data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system. Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. Attendees were encouraged to bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets were provided.
My colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel.
The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI) web site. We will use this version of the document in our upcoming tutorial at the Communities and Technologies conference at Penn State University on June 24th.
We plan to continue to expand the tutorial to include a step-by-step guide to the analysis of several major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, delicious, and flickr as well as personal stores of social media like your own email (if it is stored in a Windows Search Index found on most Windows desktops). Our goal is to create an easy-to-follow guide to network theory for people who new to the field or who do not want to develop programming skills to perform network analysis. We are focused on social media as a data source for social media although other examples are included, like the United States Senate voting network that reveals interesting patterns in the connections created when votes are cast. Using 2007 data it reveals which Senators are most likely to change party affiliation.
Your comments, corrections, and suggestions for improving the document are welcome.
Instructors interested in teaching classes about social networks are welcome to make use of both the NodeXL toolkit and the document to guide students through the core concepts of social network theory.
The Communities and Technologies conference is holding its 4th meeting in Penn State June 24-27. This conference gathers a range of scholars interested in online community, social media, social networks, and mobile social software. A paper "Analyzing (Social Media) Networks…