Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World

by Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman, Marc A. Smith

Overview

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL offers backgrounds in information studies, computer science, and sociology. This book is divided into three parts: analyzing social media, NodeXL tutorial, and social-media network analysis case studies.

Part I provides background in the history and concepts of social media and social networks. Also included here is social network analysis, which flows from measuring, to mapping, and modeling collections of connections. The next part focuses on the detailed operation of the free and open-source NodeXL extension of Microsoft Excel, which is used in all exercises throughout this book. In the final part, each chapter presents one form of social media, such as e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Youtube. In addition, there are descriptions of each system, the nature of networks when people interact, and types of analysis for identifying people, documents, groups, and events.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780123822291
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	09/29/2010
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Derek L. Hansen is an associate professor in the Information Technology program at Brigham Young University. Prior to that he was at the University of Maryland’s iSchool where he directed the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information and was a member of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Dr. Hansen completed his PhD from the University of Michigan’s School of Information where he was an NSF-funded interdisciplinary STIET Fellow focused on understanding and designing effective online socio-technical systems. Dr. Hansen’s research and teaching focuses on understanding and designing social technologies, tools, and games for the public good. He has received over $2 million in grants (as a PI or co-PI) to help develop and test novel technical interventions with interdisciplinary collaborators including educational Alternate Reality Games (AGOG, DUST, The Tessera), Playable Case Studies (Microcore), Citizen Science games (Floracaching, Odd Leaf Out), and exercise games (Fitplay Games, various pervasive play games). He has also worked with the Social Media Research Foundation and Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) to develop and evaluate NodeXL, a free network analysis and visualization tool that runs in Microsoft Excel and is designed to help community analysts make sense of the mass of data available via social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and email.

Ben Shneiderman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in 2015. He is a past recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Shneiderman is the author and coauthor of many books, technical papers, and textbooks.

Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and led the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent Systems. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a co-founder of the Social Media Research Foundation which is dedicated to Open Tools, Open Data, and Open Scholarship related to social media.

Smith’s research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Smith’s goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. At Microsoft, he developed the “Netscan” web application and data mining engine that allows 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. Smith applied this work to the development of a generalized community analysis platform for Telligent, providing a web based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web and analyze the emergent trends that result. Dr. Smith is an adjunct faculty at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

I. Getting Started with Analyzing Social Media Networks

1. Introduction to Social Media and Social Networks
2. Social media: New Technologies of Collaboration
3. Social Network Analysis: Measuring, Mapping, and Modeling Collections of Connections

II. NodeXL Tutorial: Learning by Doing

4. Getting Started with NodeXL, Layout, Visual Design, and Labeling5. Calculating and Visualizing Network Metrics 6. Preparing Data and Filtering7. Clustering and Grouping

III Social Media Network Analysis Case Studies

8. Email: The Lifeblood of Modern Communication9. Thread Networks: Mapping Message Boards and Email Lists10. Twitter: Conversation, Entertainment, And Information, All in One Network! - Scott Golder, Cornell University,Vladimir Barash, Cornell University11. Visualizing and Interpreting Facebook Networks - Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute12. WWW Hyperlink Networks - Robert Ackland, ANU13. Flickr: Linking People, Photos, and Tags - Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, Microsoft Research, Natasa Milic-Frayling, Microsoft Research14. YouTube: Contrasting Patterns of Interaction and Prominence - Dana Rotman and Jennifer Golbeck15. Wiki Networks: Connections of Creativity and Collaboration - Ted Welser, University of Maryland, Derek Hansen, University of MarylandAppendix- NodeXL for Programmers- Tony Capone

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A practical guide to using NodeXL coupled with an in-depth look into the theory and research behind its development!

Editorial Reviews

"Hansen, Shneiderman, and Smith, along with their collaborators, have written a readable introduction to the field of social media network analysis. Furthermore, the book is a nice tutorial on an interesting tool that readers can experiment with on their own. For example, the readers can simply use the Facebook application provided by Bernie Hogan, one of the book’s collaborators, to analyze the ego networks that they know best: their own network of friends, family, and acquaintances. This book offers a sure way to understand some of the basic concepts of network analysis." —Computing Reviews "This is a niche book that is also multi-discliplinary. NodeXL has involved experts in information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction and cultural studies and this book has contributions from researchers in all these fields and more. It is however highly practical and will motivate readers to use this tool for their own research." —I-Programmer.info "The authors explore the applications of Microsoft’s NodeXL, a free, open-source social network analysis (SNA) plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data, drawing on over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization." —Usability News

From the Publisher