Network graphs are appearing in a number of places. Recently, slate.com published a tool that maps the links between entities in the day's news. "To use this interactive tool, just click on a circle to see which stories mention that…
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"…
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The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11.
The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses. The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA) is the group that gathers many forms of social science research on the creation and uses of information technology. This year’s meeting included two CITASA panels, round tables, a business meeting with awards, and a (windy!) boat ride through San Francisco Bay and beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
[flickrset id=”72157621864662135″ thumbnail=”square”]The CITASA sponsored papers at the conference are listed below. The range of work illustrates the continued interest in social science studies of the impacts of information technology.
On August 5th and 6th I led a workshop with Martha Russell on social network analysis of social media as part of the Stanford Media X Summer Institute on New Metrics for New Media: Analytics for Social Media and Virtual Worlds this Summer.
New Metrics for New Media: Analytics for Social Media and Virtual Worlds
Organizers: Martha Russell, Marc Smith
August 5-6
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.
Video about the New Media for New Metrics Workshop
Agenda WEDNESDAY, August 5: #124 Wallenberg Hall
08.30 – 09.00 – Welcome, Introductions & Overview
A new book E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski on the ways social science research is being changed by the rise of social media has just been released by Routledge. My colleagues and I contributed a chapter on the ways that information visualization of social media is a useful technique to identify research questions and discover answers about the nature of human association when mediated by computation. The volume contains work from an all-star line-up of researchers who address the opportunities and challenges of performing research with computer-mediated data about social life.
The blurb about the book describes it as:
“No less than a revolutionary transformation of the research enterprise is underway. This transformation extends beyond the natural sciences, where ‘e-research’ has become the modus operandi, and is penetrating the social sciences and humanities, sometimes with differences in accent and label. Many suggest that the very essence of scholarship in these areas is changing. The everyday procedures and practices of traditional forms of scholarship are affected by these and other features of e-research. This volume, which features renowned scholars from across the globe who are active in the social sciences and humanities, provides critical reflection on the overall emergence of e-research, particularly on its adoption and adaptation by the social sciences and humanities.”
Our chapter is “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Questions: Visualization Techniques for Social Science Discovery in Computational Spaces”, co-authored by Howard T. Welser, Thomas Lento, Marc Smith, Eric Gleave and Itai Himelboim. In it, we describe the ways that using information visualizations of social media data sets is a useful way of discovering insights, patterns, and clusters. We illustrate the paper with several examples of social media information visualizations that display the range of behavior among contributors to social media spaces.
Here is the table of contents for the volume:
2009 - JCMC- Discussion Catalysts - Himelboim, Gleave and Smith JCMC Article: Discussion Catalysts My co-authors Eric Gleave, from the University of Washington, Department of Sociology and Itai Himelboim, from the University of Georgia, Department of Communications, are pleased to…
