I will speak this March 4th at the 2012 Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco about ” Crowd Photography for Social Media“.

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012/speakers.php
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012/agenda.php#

Monday @ 5:25-5:45pm

Track 1:
Social Data Case Study:
Social Media Research Foundation
Crowd Photography for Social Media

Crowds of people gather in social media around many products, services, businesses, and events but they can be difficult to see and understand. With new free and open tools, it is now possible to map and measure social media spaces, capturing the sub-groups and key people within and between them. Learn how to capture social media data and quickly generate a visual map of the crowd. With maps in hand, we will discuss ways they guide a journey to the key influencers and concepts in the crowd.

Speaker: Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

Mapping social media networks (with no coding) using NodeXL

Time: 16:50 on 01 Mar 2012.

Session type: 40 minute presentation

Topics: Visualization & Interface

Description: Maps of the complex connections that form when people link, like, reply, rate, review, favorite, friend, follow, edit, and mention one another can reveal important trends. It is possible to create network maps with free and open tools that identify key people and sub-groups in any social media population with just a few key clicks. Can you make a pie chart? You can now make a network chart.

Abstract: Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation’s (http://www.smrfoundation.org) free and open NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, Networks become as easy to create as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and email networks will be presented.

We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.

Ines Mergel is my host.  Prof. Mergel is Assistant Professor of Public Administration, Department of Public Administration and International Affairs, and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Information Policy at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, NY.

I will speak about the patterns we are finding in the data collected and analyzed by NodeXL.

On November 9th and 10th, 2011 the LocalSocialSummit11 will be held in London.

On Thursday morning, November 10th, Doctor Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute and member of the Social Media Research Foundation will speak on the topic:

Insights: Social Network Analysis On Facebook Data, with a local twist

Thursday at 3:45 I will speak at the event on:

Charting Collections Of Connections In Social Media

Following the conference from 5 to 6pm will be a reception for the Social Media Research Foundation.

Please join us for refreshments and a discussion of the ways social media analysis tools can guide your engagement with stakeholders around the world.

The event is held at wallacespace:

22 Duke’s Road, London, WC1H 9PN
t +44(0)20 7395 1265
f +44 (0)20 7836 9591
e ask@wallacespace.com

22 Duke’s Road is only minutes walk away from Euston, St Pancras International, King’s Cross and Russell Square Tube.

Registration form for attending the event is below….

The Social Media Research Foundation is pleased to announce the immediate availability of ThreadMill 0.1.  ThreadMill is a free and open application that consumes message thread data and produces reports about each author, thread, forum, and board along with visualizations of the patterns of connection and activity.  ThreadMill is written in Ruby, and depends on MongoDB, SinatraRB, HAML, and Flash to collect, analyze, and report data about collections of conversation threads.

Threaded conversations are a major form of social media.  Message boards, email and email lists, twitter, blog comments, text messages, and discussion forums are all social media systems built around the message thread data structure.  As messages are exchanged through these systems, some messages are sent as a reply to a particular previous message.  As messages are sent in reply to prior messages, chains of messages form.  Message chains come in two major forms: branching and non-branching.  Branching threads are those that allow more than one message to reply to a prior message.  Non-branching threads are single chains, like a string of pearls, that allow only one message to reply to a prior message.  Many web based message boards are non-branching.  Many email systems and discussion forums are branching.

ThreadMill requires a minimal set of data elements to generate its reports.  A data table must minimally have a column of information for each message that includes the name of the message board, the forum, the thread, and the author, along with a unique identifier for each message and the date and time it was posted.  Optional data elements include the unique identifier of the message being replied to, the URL of the message, and the URL for a profile photo.

All forms of threaded message exchange can be measured.  Simple measures like the count of the number of messages or the number of authors are obvious and useful.  Other measures can be created from more sophisticated analysis.  For example, the network of connections that forms as different authors reply to one another can be extracted and analyzed using network analysis methods.  It is possible to calculate metrics from these networks of reply that describe the location of each person in the graph.

ThreadMill generates several data sets that can be used to create visualizations of the activity and structure of a message board collection.

A Treemap data set can illustrate the hierarchy of encapsulated authors within threads, threads within fora, fora within boards, and boards within collections.  Treemap visualizations of collections of threaded conversations can quickly highlight the most active or populous discussions.

An AuthorLine visualization takes the form of a double histogram, with bubbles representing each thread active in each time period sized by the volume of messages the author contributed, sorted by size.  Threads that have been initiated by the author are represented as bubbles above the center line.  Messages that the author contributes to threads started by other authors are represented as bubbles stacked below the center line.  AuthorLines quickly reveal the pattern of activity an author displays and identifies which of several types of contributors the author is.

A scatter plot visualization represents each author as a bubble in an X-Y space defined by the number of different days the author was active against the average number of messages the author contributes to the threads in which they participate.

A time series line chart reveals the days of maximum and minimum activity along with trends.

A network diagram reveals the overall structure of the discussion space and the people who occupy strategic locations within the network graph.

ThreadMill has received generous assistance from Morningside Analytics.  Bruce Woodson implemented ThreadMill.

This year the IEEE Social Computing conference is being held in Boston, October 9-11, 2011.

The NodeXL team from the Social Media Research Foundation have a paper on our newest layout feature in NodeXL: Group-in-a-box.

Abstract: Communities in social networks emerge from interactions among individuals and can be analyzed through a combination of clustering and graph layout algorithms. These approaches result in 2D or 3D visualizations of clustered graphs, with groups of vertices representing individuals that form a community. However, in many instances the vertices have attributes that divide individuals into distinct categories such as gender, profession, geographic location, and similar. It is often important to investigate what categories of individuals comprise each community and vice-versa, how the community structures associate the individuals from the same category. Currently, there are no effective methods for analyzing both the community structure and the category-based partitions of social graphs. We propose Group-In-a-Box (GIB), a metalayout for clustered graphs that enables multi-faceted analysis of networks. It uses the treemap space filling technique to display each graph cluster or category group within its own box, sized according to the number of vertices therein. GIB optimizes visualization of the network sub-graphs, providing a semantic substrate for category-based and cluster-based partitions of social graphs. We illustrate the application of GIB to multi-faceted analysis of real social networks and discuss desirable properties of GIB using synthetic datasets.

The paper is authored by:

Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues*, Natasa Milic-Frayling†, Marc Smith‡, Ben Shneiderman§, Derek Hansen¶
* Dept. of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal – eduardamr @ acm.org
† Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK -natasamf @ microsoft.com
‡ Connected Action Consulting Group, Belmont, California, USA – marc @ connectedaction.net
§ Dept. of Computer Science & Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA – ben @ cs.umd.edu
¶ College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland – dlhansen @ umd.edu

A map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted #SocialCom2011:

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word #socialcom2011 when queried on October 10, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6232130442/sizes/l/in/ph…

Top most between users:
@danielequercia
@gadgetman4u
@bkeegan
@shaunlawson
@maryheston
@mmiiina
@ronaldomenezes
@theshadowhost
@fergal_reid
@cosleydr

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 36
Unique Edges: 119
Edges With Duplicates: 155
Total Edges: 274
Self-Loops: 105
Connected Components: 2
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 1
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 35
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 273
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 5
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.174551
Graph Density: 0.107936508
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Oracle when queried on October 5, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

Top most between users:
@benioff
@oracleopenworld
@salesforce
@arstechnica
@sai
@oracledatabase
@sapjobswithace
@kirbylunger
@capgemini
@reuters_biz

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 2747
Edges With Duplicates: 827
Total Edges: 3574
Self-Loops: 1102
Connected Components: 425
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 396
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 541
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 2923
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 10
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.475208
Graph Density: 0.00226026
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

A related map represents the connections among people who tweeted the term #OOW11

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word oow11 when queried on October 3, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: www.oracle.com/openworld/live/on-demand/index.html

Betweenness Centrality is defined here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm is defined here: pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i6/e066111

Top most between users:
@oracleopenworld
@oracle
@oracletechnet
@rwang0
@devops_borat
@salesforce
@mysql
@emcoracle
@oraclemix
@oracledatabase

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 670
Unique Edges: 5882
Edges With Duplicates: 1573
Total Edges: 7455
Self-Loops: 881
Connected Components: 45
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 44
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 626
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 7405
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 7
Average Geodesic Distance: 2.770009
Graph Density: 0.013401602
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.179

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/
NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl
NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.

Hello!

We are a group of researchers who want to create open tools, generate and host open data, and support open scholarship related to social media.

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).