Our online behaviour is far from virtual–it extends our offline lives. Much social media research has identified the positive opportunities of using social media; for example, how people use social media to form support groups online, participate in political uprising, raise money for charities, extend teaching and learning outside the classroom, etc. However, mirroring offline experiences, we have also seen social media being used to spread propaganda and misinformation, recruit terrorists, live stream criminal activities, reinforce echo chambers by politicians, and perpetuate hate and oppression (such as racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic behaviour).
Pre-requisites:
* Download and support site for "NodeXL Basic" - the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. If you can make a pie chart, you can now make a social media network map.
For background and resources related to NodeXL, please have a look at:
* NodeXLGraphGallery: A collection of social media network visualizations, descriptions, and data sets for download. Also the download point for NodeXL Pro.
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx
* Connected Action Blog about social media, sociology, information visualization, and networks:
http://www.connectedaction.net
Description: 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, updates 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.
The Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org), formed in 2010 to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media. The Foundation's current focus is on creating and publishing tools that enable social media network analysis and visualization from widely used services like email, Twitter, Facebook, flickr, YouTube and the WWW. The Foundation has released the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/), a spreadsheet add-in that supports "network overview discovery and exploration". The tool fits inside your existing copy of Excel in Office (2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016) and makes creating a social network map similar to the process of making a pie chart.
Using NodeXL, users can easily make a map of public social media conversations around topics that matter to them. Maps of the connections among the people who recently said the name of a product, brand or event can reveal key positions and clusters in the crowd. Some people who talk about a topic are more in the "center" of the graph, they may be key influential members in the population. NodeXL makes it a simple task to sort people in a population by their network location to find key people in core or bridge positions. NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, blogs and WWW hyper-links. The tool allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.
A book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is available from Morgan-Kaufmann. The book provides an introduction to the history and core concepts of social network analysis along with a series of step-by-step instructions that illustrate the use of the key features of NodeXL. The second half of the book is dedicated to chapters by a number of leading social media researchers that each focus on a single social media service and the networks it contains. Chapters on Twitter, email, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, Wikis, and the World Wide Web illustrate the network data structures that are common to all social media services.
A recent report co-authored with the Pew Research Center's Internet Project documents the discovery of the six basic forms of social media network structures present in social media platforms like Twitter. The report, "Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters" provides a step by step guide to analyzing social media networks.
Pre-requisites:
For background and resources related to NodeXL, please have a look at:
* NodeXLGraphGallery: A collection of social media network visualizations, descriptions, and data sets for download. Also the download point for NodeXL Pro.
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx
* Connected Action Blog about social media, sociology, information visualization, and networks:
http://www.connectedaction.net
* Download and support site for "NodeXL Basic" - the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. If you can make a pie chart, you can now make a social media network map.
* The Social Media Research Foundation creates NodeXL and fosters the creation of social media and network science scholarship:
* Scholarly publications: NodeXL is used frequently in peer reviewed publications as shown by Google Scholar search results:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=nodexl
* Recent press: Applying social media network maps to political and social topics:
* Video: overview of NodeXL
Personal Democracy Forum 2015: Picturing Online Crowds
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2015-pdfmarc-smithnode-xlsocial-media-sna
The Next Web 2014: Mapping social media networks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5RonanIOF8
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2014-the-next-websmrfnode-xlsnasocial-media-networks
Charting Collections of Connections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwVvQhhLUqc
#NodeXL Exploring Twitter's Social Graph
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXLXHKnDi9s
San Francisco Online Community Meetup March 26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCYpAmk_2-Y&
* Slides: overview of the NodeXL project and its applications
https://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2016-socialmediaorg-marc-smithnodexlsocial-media-sna
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Marc A. Smith
Chief Social Scientist
Connected Action Consulting Group
Marc@connectedaction.net
http://www.connectedaction.nethttp://nodexl.codeplex.com
http://twitter.com/marc_smith
http://www.smrfoundation.org/
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 convers
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