Here is an interesting use of a network diagram for data display: http://sdn.slate.com/features/endofamerica/EOANetwork.htm Readers Who Like This Apocalypse Also Preferred ... The end-of-America social network. Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" game asked readers to browse through a list of 144…
A recent paper makes use of NodeXL to create illustrations of data from connections among twitter users drawn from the United States presidential debates in October 2008. One illustration highlights the major clusters in the network. Tweet the Debates: Understanding…
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 7, 2009 at the American Sociological Association Group Processes meeting, a memorial for Professor Peter Kollock was held. Several of Peter's colleagues were in attendance and spoke about Peter's life and work. (Further below are some details about…
My colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel.
The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI) web site. We will use this version of the document in our upcoming tutorial at the Communities and Technologies conference at Penn State University on June 24th.
We plan to continue to expand the tutorial to include a step-by-step guide to the analysis of several major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, delicious, and flickr as well as personal stores of social media like your own email (if it is stored in a Windows Search Index found on most Windows desktops). Our goal is to create an easy-to-follow guide to network theory for people who new to the field or who do not want to develop programming skills to perform network analysis. We are focused on social media as a data source for social media although other examples are included, like the United States Senate voting network that reveals interesting patterns in the connections created when votes are cast. Using 2007 data it reveals which Senators are most likely to change party affiliation.
Your comments, corrections, and suggestions for improving the document are welcome.
Instructors interested in teaching classes about social networks are welcome to make use of both the NodeXL toolkit and the document to guide students through the core concepts of social network theory.
Here is the table of contents: