Dear all,
On Friday, 10/20 at 2 PM, the Network Science Institute will be hosting visiting speaker
Marc Smith for a talk titled "Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL." Details for this event follow below.
Please note that there is no scheduled NUVis invited speaker series event this Friday. We hope you can attend the event with Marc Smith instead.
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Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist at Connected Action Consulting Group
Network Science Institute
Friday, October 20, 2017
2:00 PM
177 Huntington Ave, 11th floor
Event Page
Abstract
Networks are a data structure commonly found in any social media service that allows populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation's NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to
most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, network charts become as easy to create as pie charts. Recent research created by applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations in network structures
present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Facebook and email networks will be presented.
More
info...
About the Speaker
Marc 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. Smith co-founded and directs
the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research. Smith 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. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from
Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions. Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces.
Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure,
dynamics and life cycles. While at Microsoft Research, he founded the Community Technologies Group and led the development of the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allowed researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories
of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. He contributes to the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/) that adds social network analysis features to
the familiar Excel spreadsheet. NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, WWW, Facebook and other network data sets. The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and
social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community
managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories. Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible. 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 adjunct lecturer at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.
Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.