The Center for Organizational Analytics is hosting a workshop on social network analysis with NodeXL founder.
April 4, 2018
11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (lunch included)
KoBC 204
The Social Media Research Foundation, formed in 2010 to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media, has released the NodeXL project, a spreadsheet add-in that supports “network overview discovery and exploration.” The tool fits inside your existing copy of Excel in Office 2007, 2010 and 2013, and makes creating a social network map similar to the process of making a pie chart. 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.
Presenter: Marc Smith, Founder, NodeXL
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 in California. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation, a nonprofit 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, 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. 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 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.