Transparency in Social Media: Tools, Methods and Algorithms for Mediating Online Interactions
Sorin Adam Matei, Martha G. Russell, Elisa Bertino
Springer, Aug 14, 2015

Now collected into a book, the report provides an overview of the basic social media network structures we observed in a large collection of network maps we generated from Twitter data.

I spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum on June 5, 2015 on the topic of taking pictures of virtual crowds.

Slides:

Video:

You can request a sample NodeXL social media map and report from http://connectedaction.net

Here is a map of the #PDF15 hashtag: https://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Graph.aspx?graphID=47170

The graph represents a network of 4,405 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained “#pdf15 OR #wegov OR pdmteam OR @techpresident OR “personal democracy” OR Mlsif”, tweeted over the 42-day, 2-hour, 38-minute period from Saturday, 02 May 2015 at 21:24 UTC to Sunday, 14 June 2015 at 00:02 UTC.

Top 10 Vertices, Ranked by Betweenness Centrality:
@mlsif
@mediasmartguy
@digiphile
@stone_rik
@marc_smith
@rasiej
@mitgc_cm
@civichall
@slaughteram
@dantebarry

Top Hashtags in Tweet in Entire Graph:
#pdf15
#ian1
#asmsg
#bynr
#civictech
#aga3
#artknb
#t4us
#amwriting
#authorsummit2015

By Marc Smith and Derek Hansen

Microsoft Office applications have trust issues.

When you download a NodeXL workbook from a different machine (perhaps from http://nodexlgraphgallery.org) you may get an error like this one that mentions “trusted locations”.

************** Exception Text **************

Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.

CannotCreateCustomizationDomainException: 

This document contains custom code that cannot be 

loaded because the location is not in your trusted

locations list: Sample_Facebook_Egonetwork.xlsx. If you

trust this document you can save and open it from a

location on your computer.

For more information, 

see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=99104.

******************************************

This problem is caused by a lack of trust. Excel documents may contain harmful code (“malware”) and the solution Microsoft created was the idea of “Trusted Locations”. Only folders that have been identified as “trusted locations” will allow you to open Excel files that run embedded code, which are needed by NodeXL to run.

Below are the steps needed to make a folder a trusted location. Once you have done that, NodeXL files stored in that folder will no longer display this error when they are opened.

Step 1: Open Excel Options from the File Menu in Excel

Select: Excel File Menu>Options

The Excel Options dialog. Select “Trust Center”.

Step 2: Choose the Trust Center tab on the menu on the left

The Excel Trust Center dialog. Select “Trust Center Settings”.

Step 3: Add a new trusted location where you will store your NodeXL files

Step 4. The Excel Trusted Locations dialog. Select “Add new location…”.

The Excel Trusted Location dialog. Enter the path to your NodeXL directory here.

Select the “Subfolders of this location are also trusted”. Select OK to every dialog.

It is not recommended that the download directory for your browser be granted Trusted location status.  This will require NodeXL users to download files and then copy or move them to a Trusted Location in order to open and use the complete NodeXL functionality in the file.

Business Analytics Forum hosted by the Business Analytics and Statistics Department at the University of Tennessee on April 20, 2015 will feature a talk on social media network analysis using the free and open NodeXL add-in for the popular Excel spreadsheet.

You can read more about the department and some of their initiatives here: http://issuu.com/utcba/docs/archwayswinter2014-15.finalpdf.forw/29?e=0

Hello North Bay Area network analysis fans!

Join the NodeXL users meetup at the Napa Embassy Suites hotel (1075 California Boulevard, Napa, California, 94559, USA) on the 27th of February at 6pm.

Meet other network, social network, and social media network researchers and practitioners.

Hear about the latest and upcoming updates in the free and open NodeXL application.

Connect to the NodeXL network! Please RSVP using the form below:

Connected Action enables cloud storage of your NodeXL social media network datasets.

The Connected Action NodeXL Graph Server Importer allows you to import your Twitter or Facebook data into NodeXL from the cloud based Connected Action NodeXL Graph Database.

Contact Connected Action for pricing and availability.

The Connected Action NodeXL Graph Server Database enables NodeXL users to store their social media data from Twitter and Facebook in a personal Cloud Storage locker.

Specify the search terms and queries that matter to you with your Connected Action account representative and the Connected Action NodeXL Graph Database will collect and store your social media data for you every day.

Subscribers to the Connected Action NodeXL Graph Database can then use NodeXL to import long periods of their collected social media network data in a short period of time!

The importer can be added to any recent copy of NodeXL.

Just download and unzip the add-in and copy it to the folder you have selected to hold 3rd party importers for NodeXL .

You can select the folder to use for 3rd party importers via the NodeXL menu located at:

NodeXL>Data>Import>Import Options:

This folder can be located anywhere in your file system.

When you restart NodeXL, your NodeXL>Data>Import Menu may look like this:

When you select the option “From Connected Action NodeXL Graph Server…” you will get a dialog that looks like:

Enter  your account credentials and then enter the queries you have created with your Connected Action account representative.

NodeXL will then import a social media network data set that can be automatically analyzed and visualized.

There will be a NodeXL social media network analysis training session at the Consumer Goods Sales and Marketing Summit in New York City on June 1, 2015.

The Social Media and Web Analytics Innovation conference is taking place on April 29 and 30th in San Francisco.

There will be a talk about the ways social network analysis can be applied to social media.

Using the free and open NodeXL application, it become as easy as making a pie chart to make a network chart and report.

The Social Media and Web Analytics Innovation conference is taking place on April 29 and 30th in San Francisco.

There will be a talk about the ways social network analysis can be applied to social media.

Using the free and open NodeXL application, it become as easy as making a pie chart to make a network chart and report.

The Social Media and Web Analytics Innovation conference is taking place on April 29 and 30th in San Francisco.

There will be a talk about the ways social network analysis can be applied to social media.

Using the free and open NodeXL application, it become as easy as making a pie chart to make a network chart and report.

The Social Media and Web Analytics Innovation conference is taking place on April 29 and 30th in San Francisco.

There will be a talk about the ways social network analysis can be applied to social media.

Using the free and open NodeXL application, it become as easy as making a pie chart to make a network chart and report.

The Social Media and Web Analytics Innovation conference is taking place on April 29 and 30th in San Francisco.

There will be a talk about the ways social network analysis can be applied to social media.

Using the free and open NodeXL application, it become as easy as making a pie chart to make a network chart and report.

The Data Visualization Summit is taking place in San Jose, April 28 & 29, 2015.

The summit is located at the San Jose Convention Center, 150 West San Carlos Street, San Jose, CA 95113.

There will be a talk about the ways social network analysis can be applied to better understand the shape and structure of social media.

Using the free and open NodeXL, non-programmers can now easily import, analyze, visualize and share reports on social media networks.

At the Hospitality Technology’s Hotel Technology Forum in Puerto Rico. April 22, 2015 there will be a talk about applying social media network analysis to better understand how guests talk about hotels in social media.

The guest experience is often reflected in the social media they create while on the property and after.

Some social media can help elevate a brand and provide insights and new ways to deliver services.

Some social media can amplify service problems and erode a brand.

Social media network maps and reports can help businesses navigate the complex landscape of social media, identifying the key people, groups and topics in the discussions that are relevant to the business.

In this talk we will review the ways NodeXL can be used to generate maps and reports that can guide a social media engagement strategy.

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.

There will be a NodeXL Hands-on Training session at the MURTEC (Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference) at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. March 17-19, 2015

The IT Leader’s Guide: How to Map Your Brand’s Social Media Network

Speaker:  Marc A. Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

Social media matters – it matters to consumers – and that social chatter can matter to you if you understood how to interpret it. Learn to identify your key social media influencers and use that information to amplify your brand’s message.  Uncover connections between sales and social media data, empower marketing to uncover new dining trends and brand champions, and even impact loss prevention efforts. This session will teach you how to apply social media network maps to your brand (and competitor’s). Restaurant executives, in particular those with a technology mind-set, will find great value in learning how to build, interpret and use social network maps. Participants will have an opportunity to map their own brand on social media using the free and open NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) tool.

Bring a Windows laptop running a recent copy of Office to participate in the exercises!

This is an example NodeXL social media network map and report for the hashtags #MURTEC, #HotelTechForum, #RestES or htmagazine:

Maps and reports like these reveal the structure of an online conversation, revealing the key people, groups, and topics.

The “mayors” of this discussion are:

@htmagazine, @vivianfatule, @htmagazinetv, @colorvisionc9,
@auramusicrd, @team_techy, @paolamunnigh, @chasanmiguel,
@lissyvalerio, and @josiasortizg.

The most commonly used hashtags related to this topic are:

#htmagazine, #restes, #fromage, #fort, #hospitality,
#yoveocolorvision, #htrest, #viande, #antigaspi, #mobile

Maps and reports for a range of dining and hospitality topics will be presented at the MURTEC training session.

A matrix can be directed or undirected.  In this example, we will import a directed network.

First open a blank NodeXL template.

Next open the matrix workbook in the same instance of Excel (just drag it into the title bar of the current NodeXL Excel instance).

Here is a simple asymmetric matrix with weights for tie strengths.

To import this matrix, switch back to NodeXL and select the Data>Import>From Open Matrix Workbook:

A matrix may or may not have labels (row and column headers) and the user should define what their data set looks like.

The matrix may represent a directed or undirected network (if it is undirected the matrix must be symmetrical!).

This results in data appearing in the Edges worksheet of NodeXL:

This can then be visualized as a network where the edge weights are used to set the thickness of the lines connecting two nodes:

THIRD BIENNIAL MEETING OF THE WORLD BANK GROUP’S

INTERNATIONAL CORRUPTION HUNTERS ALLIANCE (ICHA)

ENDING IMPUNITY FOR CORRUPTION

December 8 – 10, 2014, World Bank, Washington DC

I will speak about the value of a network perspective for the discovery of fraud and corruption in financial data at the December 9th session of the World Bank’s upcoming meeting of the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative.

“The World Bank Group’s International Corruption Hunters Alliance (ICHA) brings together heads and senior officials of corruption investigating bodies and prosecuting authorities, anti-corruption experts, academics, and representatives of international organizations from over 130 countries. The 2014 meeting of the Alliance will focus on fighting corruption – and the vast illicit outflows generated by corruption – by sharing know-how and experiences in the use of both traditional and alternative corruption fighting approaches.”

All financial transactions create a network as one person transfers money from one account to another.  A list of transactions creates a web of connections with an emergent shape or pattern.  Within these patterns are key positions occupied by people with special power in the network.  Mapping these transaction networks can reveal the hidden traces of financial crime.

I am delighted to return to South Africa where I will participate in the Mammoth BI conference in Cape Town, on November 17-18, 2014 at the Cape Town International Conference Centre, Convention Square, 1 Lower Long Street, Cape Town, 8001, Western Cape, South Africa.

I will speak at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) at a symposium on The Future of Big Data in Lincoln, Nebraska, on November 6 and 7, 2014.

The event will feature presentations from academia, government, and the private sector, and workshops/lectures on topics related to big data. This event is open to the public.

Students and postdoctoral researchers are welcome to attend. The event should bring together people working in the computational sciences, federal agencies, and industry experts specializing in data management, analytics, and the future of information.

Agenda: Thursday, November 6

Friday, November 7

8:30 a.m. Adam Glynn, Emory University, and Konstantin Kashin, Harvard; Big Data and Social Sciences
9:15 a.m. Jennifer Thoegersen, UNL Data Curation Librarian
10:00 a.m. Panel with representatives from federal agencies to discuss funding opportunities:

• Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D., Associate Director for Data Science, NIH
• Ian Foster, Ph.D., Director of the Computation Institute & Argonne Distinguished Fellow, Argonne National Lab
• George Strawn (Director, Networking and Information Technology Research & Development; NITRD)

12:00 p.m. Lunch and Keynote Speaker (Animal Sciences)

1:00 p.m. Todd Mockler, Danforth Center
1:45 p.m. Henry Neeman, HPC, University of Oklahoma
2:30 p.m. Adjourn

The 2014 Restaurant Executive Summit will be held on November 3 – 5, 2014 at the Ritz-Carlton in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

The theme of the event is “How to Feed Consumers with a #Digital @ppetite”

I will speak about the ways that restaurants and dining experiences are discussed in social media.  I will show network maps that visualize the relationships among people who talk about restaurants created with the free and open NodeXL social media network analysis and visualization application.

Here are some recent NodeXL social media network maps for mentions of major chain restaurants featured in the NodeXL Graph Gallery:

DunkinDonuts

McDonalds

Chipotle

@olivegarden

These maps illustrate the shape of the crowd that gathers around the names of major chain restaurants.  A few Twitter user accounts occupy key positions in these network crowds, these are the influential voices that are repeated widely by others.

Closer inspection (click through for details) reveals smaller groups or clusters which form as a smaller set of people interact with one another more than with the larger population.  These groups have distinct topics of interest which are summarized in the content report associated with each visualization.

The network and content report can reveal the topics of interest to various groups in the discussion as well as the key people within each group.

Using the NodeXL social media network analysis add-in for Excel from the Social Media Research Foundation, I have made a large collection of network visualizations and reports, many of which can be seen in the NodeXL Graph Gallery.

Now that I have seen many social media network maps I observe that marketers are often interested in building “broadcast” network patterns.  This is one of the six basic social media network patterns documented in the recent Pew Research Internet Project report about Mapping Twitter Topic Networks.

There are at least three phases of possible success for a social media marketing effort: phase 1, you get an audience of people who will retweet what you post.  Phase 2, some of your audience gets its own audience for the content they repost from you.  Phase 3, a dense web of relationships emerges, a community of relationships.  This is a desirable phase because it sustains the conversation event when new messages from the brand account are not created.

I attended and participated in the October 2-3, 2014 Digital Strategies for Development Summit hosted by the Asian Institute of Management and held in Makati City, Philippines.

The event gathered 50 speakers from around the world and more than 300 participants to focus on the role of digital and social technologies for civic needs.  The summit focused on bringing people from many communities into a discussion of how technology can be used for:

“…enabling a better society and an empowered community? How can various stakeholders, including Government, Private Sector and Civil Society gain more momentum for their core mandates by leveraging the use of digital technology enabled solutions? Can Digital Technology create a platform for better collaboration and cooperation amongst various stakeholders?”

I spoke about the role social network analysis can play in understanding the emerging world of social media and computer mediated collective action.

Best Practice in Data Journalism Workshop

PROGRAM
29-30 September 2014

Terrace Lounge, Level 1, Walter Boas Building, Parkville Campus

(Campus map at http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville)

MONDAY 29 SEPTEMBER

There will be a 3 hour session introducing NodeXL on Tuesday from 2-5pm 30th September at the main Parkville campus of UniMelb. The event is open to the public and is free.

It will be in the Old Arts Building Lecture Theatre B.

The main session will run from 2-4pm and there will be an additional hour for those that want to stop on for further training, finishing at 5pm

If you want to use NodeXL in the session, you will need a Windows laptop, and the Windows version of Excel (2007/2010/2013).

You can download NodeXL in advance from: http://nodexl.codeplex.com/.

Map and Building: 

http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/149#.VCTinmS1Zlo

Download instructions:

 http://nodexl.codeplex.com/releases/view/117659

I will be speaking at the University of Sydney on September 26th, 2014 as part of the 2014 Sydney Disrupt conference.

This year’s theme is “Living Disruption”.

Speakers include:

• A keynote by Maria Ogneva, on community building for employee and customer engagement
• A keynote by Tom Hajdu, CEO of Disrupter, on disruptive innovations in the entertainment industry
• Mya Dellow presenting her perspective on the educational value of the online gaming platform Minecraft.
• Academy Award winner Mark Sagar demonstrating BabyX, a photo-realistic, intelligent infant avatar.
• A panel of experts discussing the potentials and risk of gamification.
• Marc Smith from the Social Media Research Foundation will provide practical knowledge about analyzing social media data in straight forward ways with freely available tools.
• Ripple Effect Group team leading a wearable technologies design workshop.

Here is a recent map of the connections among people who tweeted “#disrupt“:

Here is a video review of the 2013 #Disrupt event.

I will also lead a workshop on using NodeXL, in a hands-on training on 25th September 2014 from 9am to 12pm in the Link Building (J13), Room 417.

The workshop is sponsored by the Digital Disruption Research Group (DDRG), in collaboration with the Complex Systems Research Group at the Faculty of Engineering & IT.

RIS News, the leading media organization for retail executives, and Consumer Goods Technology, the leading source for the consumer goods sector, have partnered to launch the 2014 Retail and Consumer Goods Analytics Summit. The conference hashtag is #RCAS2014.

I will speak on September 12th at the event.  I present the Closing Keynote from 2:30 – 3:10pm on Friday.  My talk is titled:

The Impact of Social Media on Data & Analytics 

Speaker:  Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

People talk about the products and services the use, love or hate all the time in social media.  These conversations can be better understood through perspective of social network analysis.  Network theory views the world as a web of connected people.  Network analysis builds measures and visualizations of collections of connections to reveal the key people, groups and issues in these conversations.  Using social media network maps and reports the confusing landscape of tweets and posts comes into focus.  Information visualizations of the virtual crowds of people gathered around every brand, product, event, or service highlights the range of variation in the shape of these crowds.  Six different patterns have been identified so far, allowing social media managers to recognize the nature of the brand network they have and the nature of the network they want to have.  Network measures are useful as KPIs for tracking not just the size and volume of a social media stream, but also the shape and structure of the pattern of connections.  The six patterns: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and in and out hub and spoke, are a useful guide to strategic engagement in social media.

risnewsinsights Twitter…

consumergoods OR cgsm20

The NodeXL team seeks qualified full and part time software developers to contribute to the development of the NodeXL application and the NodeXL Graph Gallery web site.

NodeXL is sponsored by the Social Media Research Foundation and is a free and open way to get insights into connected structures like networks.  NodeXL makes it easy to extract networks from many social media platforms, and automatically process the data into a network visualization and report.  Using NodeXL researchers, scholars, analysts, marketing, PR and event professionals can all easily collect, store, analyze, visualize, and publish reports on social media networks.

We seek a skilled developer who can work in a distributed virtual team to maintain end extend the application.

Candidates should have the following skills:

Required: .NET development skills in C#.

Because most of the NodeXL software is written in C#.

Required: Basic system administrator skills.  Amazon EC2 experience is a plus, but certainly not required.

We have three NodeXL EC2 servers that need to be kept up and running.  This involves regular server monitoring, backups, Windows updates, increasing disk sizes when necessary, and so on.

Desired: Excel programming skills, preferably with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).

The NodeXL Excel Template uses VSTO.  These skills might be hard to come by, though, and any C# programmer should be able to learn the Excel programming model without much difficulty.

Desired: MySQL programming and administrator skills.

The NodeXL Graph Server runs on MySQL.  Bonus: Experience dealing with larger databases.  The Graph Server database is approaching half a terabyte, and having someone who knows how to manage that would be a big plus.

Desired: ASP.NET / HTML / CSS / JavaScript skills.

The NodeXL Graph Gallery is implemented in ASP.Net.

Desired: SQL Server programming skills.

The NodeXL Graph Gallery back end runs on SQL Server.

Would be nice: Forum moderation experience.

Because people ask lots of questions on the NodeXL CodePlex Discussion board.

Interested?  Email marc@connectedaction.net to submit an application.

I will speak on June 18th at the IIeX-NA 2014 event in Atlanta, Georgia.  The Insight Innovation Exchange conference focuses on advances in market research.

My talk is about the ways social network analysis can reveal important patterns in social media.

CHARTING COLLECTIONS OF CONNECTIONS IN SOCIAL MEDIA:

CREATING MAPS AND MEASURES WITH NODEXL

Susan Griffin (Chair), Marc Smith

The requested date range was from Tuesday, 01 April 2014 at 00:00 UTC through Sunday, 08 June 2014 at 23:59 UTC.

The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 67-day, 4-hour, 35-minute period from Tuesday, 01 April 2014 at 00:26 UTC to Saturday, 07 June 2014 at 05:01 UTC.

There is an edge for each “replies-to” relationship in a tweet, an edge for each “mentions” relationship in a tweet, and a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a “replies-to” or “mentions”.

The graph is directed.

The graph’s vertices were grouped by cluster using the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm.

The graph was laid out using the Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm.

The edge colors are based on edge weight values. The edge widths are based on edge weight values. The edge opacities are based on edge weight values. The vertex sizes are based on followers values. The vertex opacities are based on followers values.

Top 10 Vertices, Ranked by Betweenness Centrality:
@lennyism
@insightnovation
@beyondverbal
@socialdecode
@rebmannresearch
@danielfalcon
@lrwonline
@rafacespedes
@fearlesscomp
@eyeonmedialatam

Top URLs in Tweet in Entire Graph:
http://www.iiex-na.org
http://www.iiex-na.org/
http://www.iiex-na.org/sponsors/
https://events.bizzabo.com/iiexlatam2014/welcome
http://chile.feebbo.com/feebboch/surveys/anon/participate/3143
http://www.iicompetition.org/idea/view/312
http://www.iiex-latam.org/
http://www.iicompetition.org/idea/view/321
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/the-naked-brand-the-future-of-marketing-wTo1reeNTNugBjR1Qj~gnA.html
http://commun.it

]]> https://www.connectedaction.net/june-18th-2014-iiex-na-atlanta-georgia/feed/ 1 https://www.connectedaction.net/june-27-29-2014-networks-in-the-global-world-2014-st-petersburg-russia/ Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:11 +0000 http://www.connectedaction.net/?p=6369

NetGloW ’14: Bridging Theory and Method: American, European, and Russian Studies

June 27-29, St Petersburg, Russia

I will remotely participate in the conference “Networks in the Global World 2014. Bridging Theory and Methods: American, European and Russian Studies” taking place in St Petersburg, Russia, June 27-29 2014. The 2 day, single-track conference will also have pre-conference workshops including a day devoted to using the NodeXL social media network analysis application. The primary organizing institution and host is the Centre for German and European Studies, Bielefeld University and the St Petersburg State University.

This will be the 2nd Networks in the Global World conference (for information on the 1st one held in 2012 see http://www.ngw.spbu.ru). This conference series brings together researchers exploring cutting edge networks research from around the globe. In 2014 the focus is on linking theory and methods that integrate information, communication, semantic and cultural networks.

The primary goal of the NetGloW conference series is to bring together networks researchers from around the globe, to unite the efforts of various scientific disciplines in response to the key challenges faced by network studies today, and to exchange local research results – thus allowing an analysis of global processes. It is also crucial for us to support junior researchers’ orientation in the complex landscape of network science, and to encourage applications of network analysis by practitioners.

The idea of the 2014 event is to discuss the key current issues and problems of linking theoretical and methodological developments in network analysis.

The structure of the conference: June 27^th – workshops and seminar for practitioners; June 28^th & 29^th – presentations.

Confirmed invited speakers:

• Jana Diesner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Loet Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Tom Valente, University of Southern California, USA
• Dimitris Christopoulos, MODUL University Vienna, Austria
• Mario Diani, University of Trento, Italy
• Peter Groenewegen, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Wouter de Nooy, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Johanne Saint-Charles, University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada
• Marc Smith, Connected Action Consulting Group, USA

The sessions of the conference will include the following:

• Networks in Science, Technology, and Innovation: Traditional Approaches and Operationalization of New Theories
• Words and Networks
• Network Perspectives on Knowledge, Communication and Culture
• Making Sense of Big Network Data: Testing Hypotheses on New Data
• Social Movements and Collective Action as the Network Phenomena
• Network Analysis of Political and Policy-making Domains

The conference will host workshops on the following network analysis software: ConText, Pajek, NodeXL, UCINet, RSiena.

The conference will include seminar Network analysis: How can it be used by globally operating practitioners?

Host: Center for German and European Studies (St. Petersburg State University – Bielefeld University).

Working language: English.

Abstracts (200 words) will be published as a part of conference programme. Full papers (2500 words) should be submitted prior to the event. Selected full papers will be published in peer-reviewed journal(s).

Free accommodation will be provided for MA and PhD students who submitted the best abstracts.

Fee: Participation in the conference is free of charge.

Further information about the conference and registration form can be found at www.ngw.spbu.ru or requested via e-mail: netglow@spbu.ru.

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

We have released an updated version of NodeXL that simplifies and merges the previously separate User and List importers.

The new, streamlined importer treats an individual user as a list of one.

Lists can be defined by pointing to an existing Twitter List or simply entering a list of delimited user names into the text box.

The updated importer now collects many more tweets per person and parses these messages to generate reply and mention edges.

You can now define a group of Twitter users and find out how much they reply and mention one another.

You can even pull in the followers of each person, to see if they reply or mention people they also follow.

But ever since June 11, 2013, Twitter has made access to the “follows” edge data very difficult (its just very slow).  Designed and implemented prior to the update that restricted access to the follower network, the original NodeXL Twitter list importers relied mostly on queries that are now impractically slow for all but the smallest lists of users who have small collections of followers.

The update to these User and List importer is partially an adaptation to these changes.  The importer shifts away from the follower network to focus on the communication interaction data in the content of Tweets.  Since Twitter offers more generous access to Tweets than to information about who follows who, we are obliged to make better use of what they do offer.

The results are insightful!  Here is a map of the connections among the members of the United States Congress.

The slides associated with the talk can be found here:

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World

I will speak at the Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State University on Thursday, May 15, 2014.

I will talk about the themes Thinking across Boundaries, Learning by Doing, and Innovating through Collaboration in the context of the work of the Social Media Research Foundation to deliver an end-user friendly, free and open tool for social media network analysis.

The NodeXL project from the Social Media Research Foundation has crossed many boundaries, notably bridging the divide between the social sciences and the computer sciences.

We have learned a great deal as the NodeXL development team has released hundreds of updates to the application, guided by the feedback of our growing user community.

The Social Media Research Foundation team has innovated at multiple levels: organizationally we are a modern, virtual, distributed group of collaborators.  Technically, we have focused our project on ease of use and automation rather than scale and sophistication, our users are not programmers.  We have implemented many innovative network analysis and visualization techniques because we have been driven by a need to serve a diverse user population.  The contributors to the project are themselves from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds, making it easier to shape the tool for the broadest audience.

Each of the six patterns is generated by the behavior of the individuals in the population.

In many cases the pattern you are is not the pattern you want to be.

This table describes each of the six patterns in terms of the difference between that pattern and the other five patterns.

Go down the rows until you find the pattern that most closely matches the network you currently have.  Then work across the columns until you find the pattern that you want to become.

At the intersection is a color and a few ways to change and measure the transition from where you are to where you want to be.

A red square indicates an undesirable transition (who wants to become a divided discussion?).  A yellow square is a low probability and difficult transition (it is hard to go from divided to unified).  A blue square is a challenge but possible while a green square is a fairly easy transition to make.

Using this guide, you can plan a strategy for your social media engagement.

This slide is part of a larger slide deck about using social media network analysis to guide engagement.  Look for slide 71.

The NodeXL team has just released a new version of the application.

Version 320 of NodeXL has some important changes.

Most important:
All existing users of NodeXL
*MUST*
* UNINSTALL *
all existing copies of the application from their systems
prior to installing this version.

Benefits: NodeXL will now provide automated updates.  Everyday NodeXL will check for updated code and patch itself automatically.

This is the LAST update for NodeXL that will require user involvement.  We will push new features out to users as they are available and they will just show up in user’s applications.

Some additional features of the latest update:

• Imported Twitter networks now have an “in-reply-to tweet ID” column. This is a useful data element for building “paths” that capture how information flows through a network.
  

• When you lay out each of the graph’s groups in its own box, you can now select how the boxes are laid out. Go to NodeXL>Graph>Layout>Layout Options in the Excel ribbon. (Thanks to Cody Dunne for this feature.)
  
  
• The Check for Updates item has been removed from the Excel ribbon. NodeXL now automatically checks for updates once a day.  Once this release is installed, NodeXL will automatically update itself when a new release is available. You will no longer have to manually download and install new releases.  This release and those that follow will all be referred to as “NodeXL Excel Template 2014.” New releases will continue to have version numbers, but the numbers will be less important in light of the new auto-update feature.

• If you use third-party graph data importers, such as the Social Network Importer for NodeXL, note that the folder where the importers are stored has changed. See “Using third-party graph data importers in NodeXL Excel Template 2014” at http://nodexl.codeplex.com/discussions/522826.
• If you use third-party graph data importers, such as the Social Network Importer for NodeXL, note that the folder where the importers are stored must be specified in the NodeXL>Data>Import>Import Options dialog:

• If you use the NodeXL Network Server, an advanced command-line program that downloads a network from Twitter and stores the network on disk in several file formats, note that the program is no longer a part of NodeXL Excel Template. See “Using the NodeXL Network Server command-line program with NodeXL Excel Template 2014” at http://nodexl.codeplex.com/discussions/522830.

• When a Twitter network is imported, the hashtags in the “Hashtags in Tweet” (or “Hashtags in Latest Tweet”) column are now all in lower case.  Previously, identical strings with different case letters would be counted differently.  This is no longer the case and the result is that terms that had been divided are now unified.  These terms will now have higher values and there will be more diversity in the top ten list.

Thanks for using NodeXL and stay tuned for additional updates!

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Research Center was interviewed by Bob Garfield on OnTheMedia this week about the recently released report on mapping Twitter topic networks.  The report found six distinct patterns of social media networks in Twitter: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and in and out hub and spoke patterns. They discuss the prospects for overcoming polarization in social media and the hopeful signs that many other forms of social network structures exist in addition to the divided network pattern.

The NodeXL project hit a milestone this week with 250,000 downloads.

Thanks to our users for their continued interest and support of the NodeXL project!

March 16, 2014: Predictive Analytics World, San Francisco.

Track 1: Social Media Analysis Think Link! Network Insights with No Programming Skills

March 18: Consortium for Service Innovation Annual Member Summit

April 2 – April 4, 2014, UCDC Center, Washington DC, USA, 2014 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (SBP14)

April 24-24, 2014 The Next Web, Amsterdam

May 1-2, 2014: The Social Media & Web Analytics Summit

May 8th, 2014: 2014 SQL PASS Business Analytics Conference in San Jose.

May 19-23, 2014: International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems, Minneapolis, Minnesota

June 27-29 2014: Networks in the Global World 2014. Bridging Theory and Methods: American, European and Russian Studies