The Communities and Technologies conference is holding its 4th meeting in Penn State June 24-27. This conference gathers a range of scholars interested in online community, social media, social networks, and mobile social software. A paper "Analyzing (Social Media) Networks…
The upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston June 22-25 features several presentations of possible interest. George Dearing and I will both be on panels and, centrally, there is a presentation from Telligent co-founder Rob Howard about what is new at Telligent Systems:
Enterprise 2.0: Work, Productivity and ROI Today’s ever-changing workforce requires that enterprises tackle an array of shifting demands. Adapting to the various ways people collaborate and work together without actually being in the same place is now an organizational necessity, not just an option. Join us for this informative session as Rob Howard, Founder of Telligent and an innovator of online collaboration strategies, presents Enterprise 2.0 and social computing in the context of work, productivity and ROI. Enterprises that have embraced collaborative computing and analytics are realizing results in increased workforce productivity, expanded input and insight from customers and partners, and now have the ability to manage and report on the value of these efforts. Join us for this session and walk away understanding how you can prepare today for the future of work.
Speaker – Rob Howard, Co-Founder, Telligent
George Dearing from Telligent and I will both be on additional panels at the conference. I am looking forward to the chance to present along with Kate Niederhoffer from Dachis again; we presented at Web 2.0 on the topic of “Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation” which I think was well received. Details below:
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Last week’s NodeXL meeting focused on the coming work items for the next release. Four major items are lined up for the next few weeks. We may publish a release once a few of these items are complete.
> Legends and axes with scale marks for the chart canvass.
This is part of our larger work item called “Make the charts ready to publish”. A related work item to address this goal is export to a vector file format. A scalable vector format will allow people to create graphs of arbitrary resolutions to fit their presentation needs.
> Export to XPS (which should make it possible to get our files to PDF with some 3rd party help!)
Since NodeXL is intended to support non-programmer network analysts we plan to add support for other network analysis file formats. A leading example is the UCINet format which has the added virtue of holding many sample data sets that are widely used in classes and network course work. If you have a network data file format you would like NodeXL to support feel free to comment here or on the Codeplex NodeXL discussion.
> UCINet file format compatibility
Improvements to the layout of complex graphs is a deep area of research. A recent member of the NodeXL team, Janez Brank has proposed and prototyped an alternative mechanism for node layout, namely the Fast Multi-Scale Method from Harel and Koren. This method initially selects a small subset of nodes and lays them out; this initial layout is then refined in several iterations, with more and more nodes added to the layout in each iteration, until a layout of the entire graph is created. The cost function used to optimize the layout at each step is designed to reward layouts in which the Euclidean distance between nodes corresponds approximately to the length of the shortest path between them. Our developer, Tony Capone, plans to implement the design in the coming weeks. We have not added a new layout for a while and those recent additions have been deterministic geometric layouts like grid, circle, and sine wave. We have never added an alternative to the Fruchterman-Reingold force directed layout with which we started the project. This is a big feature addition that should have a big impact in making NodeXL layouts more visually appealing and informative.
> Updated layout #1
We hope these features deliver a lot of value to our users and address the big themes the team is working towards: Scale, Clarity, and Connection. We seek to make NodeXL perform against reasonably sized data sets, to improve the exploration and discovery of structures in graphs, and to simplify the import and export of data between NodeXL and social media network data sources beyond the email and Twitter support present in the application today.
Some other features that we have been considering include:
New menu items have been added to NodeXL in the v.85 release made available today! These "Visual Properties" features are part of a larger set of work items intended to make it easier to manipulate and decorate a network graph…
Here is an updated version of the introduction to NodeXL slide deck. 2009 - Node XL v.84+ - Social Media Network Visualization Tools For Excel 2007 View more presentations from Marc Smith. The slides will continue to update as we…
The recent 2009 ICWSM conference featured research into the nature of a wide range of social media. [flickrset id="72157618579371124" thumbnail="square" overlay="true" size="medium"] Some highlights: An Examination of Language Use in Online Dating Profiles Meenakshi Nagarajan, Marti Hearst Event Detection and…