Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media:
Creating Visualizations with NodeXL
Cody Dunne
cdunne@cs.umd.edu
Philip Merrill College of Journalism Colloquium
October 22, 2012, College Park, MD.
My Background
NodeXL
(Bonsignore et al, 2009;
Smith et al, 2009)
GraphTrail
(Dunne et al, 2012)
STICK
(Shneiderman et al,
2011; Gove et al, 2011)
Action Science Explorer
(Dunne et al, 2012;
Gove et al, 2011)
NetGrok
(Blue et al, 2008)
Why Visualization?
Networks
Edge List
Adjacency Matrix
Vertex1
Vertex2
Alice
Bob
Alice
Cathy
Alice
Bob
Cathy
Alice
0
1
1
Cathy
Bob
0
0
0
Alice
Cathy
1
0
0
Who Uses Network Analysis
Sociology
Scientometrics
Biology
Urban
Planning
Politics
Archaeology
WWW
Gephi
Pajek
Cytoscape
What is Social
Media?
Social Media
is all about
connections
from people
to people.
Patterns are
left behind
There are many kinds of ties….
Like, Link, Reply, Rate, Review, Favorite, Friend, Follow, Forward, Edit, Tag, Comment, Check-in…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/3254238329
“Think Link”
Nodes & Edges
Is related to
A
B
Strong ties
Weak ties
Robert Scoble’s
Social Media
“Star Fish”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/1814873464/sizes/o/
Social
Networks
• History: from
the dawn of
time!
• Jacob L.
Moreno
(1934)
Why do can we find
in Social Media?
Hubs
Bridges
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/3295494976/sizes/o/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amycgx/3119640267/
Why are these
features important?
Understanding
information flow
Organizations
Data sources
• Email
• Message Boards
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Document sharing
• Activity streams
Goals
• Marketing
• Support
• Identify experts
• Identify key employees
Communities
Welser, Howard T., Eric Gleave, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith. 2007.
Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups.
The Journal of Social Structure. 8(2).
Experts and “Answer People”
Discussion people, Topic setters
Discussion starters, Topic setters
smrfoundation.org
What we have done: Open Tools
• YASNAT: NodeXL
• Data providers (“spigots”)
• FOSS
NodeXL
Collect data, Excel analysis, statistics, visualization, layout
algorithms, filtering, clustering, attribute mapping…
What we have done: Open Data
NodeXLGraphGallery.org
What we have done: Open Scholarship
What we have done: Open Scholarship
http://nodexl.codeplex.com
Forthcoming,
Sept 2010
Like MSPaint™ for graphs.
— the Community
Introduction to NodeXL