We are social media researchers who want to create open tools, generate and host open data, and support open scholarship related to social media. The Social Media Research Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt public charity incorportated in California.
Social media is the term for all the ways people connect to people through computation. Mobile devices, social networks, micro-blogging and location sharing are just a few of the ways people engage in computer-mediated collective action.
Mapping, measuring and understanding the landscape of social media is our mission. We support tool projects that enable the collection, analysis and visualization of social media data. We host data sets that are relevant to social media research. And we will support graduate students studying and building research related to social media.
Today, our primary project is NodeXL, the free and open network overview discovery and exploration add-in for Excel 2007 (and 2010) that extends the familiar spreadsheet so that it can collect, analyze and visualize complex social networks.
We plan to take on additional projects that improve the variety and quality of data available to the NodeXL social network analysis platform (among others that consume the open GraphML format).
The Social Media Research Foundation is a group of researchers and practitioners working to create open tools, generate and host open data, and support open scholarship related to social media.
Contributors to SMRF include Natasa Milic-Frayling from Microsoft Research, Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues from the University of Porto, Ben Shneiderman, Derek Hansen, Udayan Khurana, Cody Dunne and others at the University of Maryland, Marc Smith at Connected Action Consulting, Jure Leskovec at Stanford University, Vladimir Barash and Scott Golder at Cornell, Bernie Hogan at Oxford University, Robert Ackland at the Australian National University, and Libby Hemphill at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Recent additions to the Social Media Research Foundation include John Kelly from Morningside Analytics, Itai Himelboim from the University of Georgia, Han Woo Park from Yeungnam University, and Gihong Yi from Hallym University.
Your support keeps our projects, like NodeXL, active and strong. Please contribute.
Marc A. Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer-mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Connected Action (www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and Internet social media usage. He is the co-editor, with Peter Kollock, of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity, interaction, and social order develop in online groups. Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M. Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an affiliate faculty at the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Media-X program.
Ben Shneiderman (www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and founding director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Shneiderman is the co-author, with Catherine Plaisant, of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., April 2009), www.awl.com/DTUI. With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored “Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think” (1999). With Ben Bederson he co-authored The Craft of Information Visualization (2003). His book Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Values and the New Computing Technologies appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) (http://mitpress.mit.edu/leonardoslaptop) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.
As Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC), Natasa Milic-Frayling is setting research directions for Integrated Systems group (http://research.microsoft.com/is), a cross-disciplinary team focused on design, prototyping and evaluation of information and communication systems and services. She also serves as Director of Research Partnership with industry (http://research.microsoft.com/rpp), the MSRC programme that facilitates collaboration between MS Research and industry leading partners and clients. Natasa is actively involved with a wider industry and academic community, promoting research and innovation through public speaking and research engagements.
Derek L. Hansen is an Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University’s Information Technology program in the School of Technology (http://it.et.byu.edu/). Dr. Hansen completed his PhD from the University of Michigan’s School of Information where he was an NSF-funded interdisciplinary STIET Fellow (http://stiet.si.umich.edu/) focused on understanding and designing effective online socio-technical systems. His research focuses on mass collaboration, games for change, citizen science, consumer health informatics, and social network analysis and visualization.
Scott Golder (@redlog) is a graduate student in Sociology at Cornell University. He was previously a researcher at HP Labs, and holds an A.B. in Linguistics with Computer Science from Harvard University and an M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Laboratory. His research interests broadly include network and social identity effects online, which he has examined in a variety of environments including usenet, online poker, social bookmarking and social network services. His website is www.redlog.net.
Vladimir Barash (@vlad43210) is a Senior Researcher and Engineer at Morningside Analytics. He has received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, where he studied with Michael Macy, Jon Kleinberg, and Claire Cardie. Both at Cornell and now at Morningside, Vladimir’s research interests focus mainly on social media, diffusion and viral marketing, meme tracking, and other topics around the dynamics of memetic objects in online communities. In his spare time, Vladimir blogs at: vlad43210.wordpress.com.
Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Bernie’s work focuses on the process of networking, or maintaining connections with other people. His dissertation focused on the use of multiple media for networking while his current research on Facebook looks at the complexities of networking with multiple groups on a single site.
Robert Ackland is a Fellow at the Australian National University. He works on the development of new approaches (and associated software) for empirical social science research into online social and organizational networks, and has recently studied the networking behavior of political bloggers and environmental activists. Robert has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and the ANU, where he completed his PhD in economics in 2001. In 2005 he established the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (http://voson.anu.edu.au) project and in 2007, he was awarded a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellowship and an Oxford University James Martin Visiting Fellowship (at the Oxford Internet Institute). Robert coordinates the ANU’s Master of Social Research programme and teaches courses on the social science of the Internet and online research methods. He is currently writing a related book (to be published by SAGE).
Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues is an Assistant Professor of Informatics Engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal. Her research interests lie in the broad areas of data mining and web information retrieval. In particular, her current research is focused on the interplay between social sciences and web technologies, aiming to develop effective data mining techniques for characterizing user behavior in online communities and improving information retrieval in social media. She holds a Ph.D. in Electronic & Electrical Engineering from University College London, UK.
Howard T. Welser is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio University, where he explores issues of social change and technology in courses on group processes, introduction to sociology, and research methods. His research investigates how micro-level processes generate collective outcomes, with application to status achievement in avocations, development of institutions and social roles, the emergence of cooperation, and network structure in computer mediated interaction. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington.
Dana Rotman is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland iSchool. She holds an L.Lb in Law from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an MA in Information Studies (Cum Laude) from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Her research lies in the intersection of content and structure of social media. Currently she is studying the effect different tools and communication intentions have on the interaction created around videos that are shared online. She is the recipient of the 2009 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award.
Libby Hemphill (http://www.libbyh.com) is a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan where she explores the experiences of newcomers to established virtual organizations and the use of technologies in environmentally sustainable decision-making. She is interested in the roles of social media in decision-making and community development. Libby will join the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology in August as an Assistant Professor of Technical Communication. She holds a Ph.D. in Information from the University of Michigan.
Han Woo Park, (@hanwoopark) studies the network structure of social media, particularly political discussions in Korea. He leads the Webometrics Institute in Yeungnam University in Deagu, Korea.
Gihong Yi (@gihong) is interested in investigating the relationship between offline behavior and online content in explaining ordinary people’s everyday life, and has co-authored books including Understanding the Information Society (Korean, <<정보사회의 이해>>) and has participated in interdisciplinary research projects on SNS and online policies. Yi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Hallym University, with trainings in economic sociology (mainly social capital and the quality of life), social network analysis, and empirical methodology from Seoul National University (BA) and UCLA (MA + PhD).
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