Introducing the SMRF AI Assistant

The Social Media Research Foundation exists to make the study of social media networks open and accessible. Today we are adding a small piece to that mission: an AI Assistant that answers questions about NodeXL and social media network analysis in seconds.

You will find it in three places:

• smrfoundation.org
• nodexl.com
• The FAQ Page inside NodeXL

Whether you are a researcher, a student, a journalist, or simply curious about how online conversations are structured, you can ask it a question and get a clear, quick answer.

What you can ask

The Assistant is built for the moments when you want an answer without breaking your flow. For example:

• “How do I collect data from X, Reddit, or YouTube in NodeXL?”
• “What does betweenness centrality tell me about an account?”
• “How do I detect the communities inside a network?”
• “How do I turn my data into a map I can share?”
• “I am new to network analysis. Where should I start?”

Ask it the way you would ask a knowledgeable colleague, and follow up if you want more.

Why we built it

Network analysis rewards curiosity, but it can be intimidating at the start. A first-time user often has a simple question standing between them and a finished map, and until now the answer lived in documentation, a book, or someone’s inbox. We wanted to shorten that path.

The Assistant is a friendly first responder for those questions, available the moment you have one. It fits the Foundation’s goal of lowering the barrier to studying social media networks, so more people can do this work.

How to get the best answers

• Be specific. Name the data source, metric, or step you are working on.
• Give a little context. A sentence about what you are trying to do helps the answer fit.
• Keep the conversation going. If the first answer is close, tell it what is missing and ask again.

NodeXL Basic is free to download and runs in Microsoft Excel, so you can try any answer the Assistant gives you straight away.

What it does, and what it does not

The Assistant is here to help you get unstuck quickly. It complements, and does not replace, the NodeXL documentation, the book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL, and NodeXL Academy. It is a guide, not a final authority on your particular dataset.

It is also new, so it will not have every answer yet and will sometimes get one wrong. We would rather share it early and improve it with you than wait for it to be perfect.

Tell us how it did

We would love your feedback on the help the Assistant provides. If you get no answer, or a bad answer, please let us know at Contact us. That feedback is how it gets better, and it genuinely shapes what we improve first.

Try it now

Open the SMRF AI Assistant at smrfoundation.org, on nodexl.com, or from the FAQ Page in NodeXL, and ask it your first question.