Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media – Lunch Talk with Marc Smith

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Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media –
Lunch Talk with Marc Smith
Monday, 18 November 2019 ·  1 pm · HIIG Kitchen

We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. 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 formed to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media. The Foundation has released the NodeXL project, a spreadsheet add-in that supports “network overview discovery and exploration”. 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. The tool allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.

Dr. Marc A. 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, a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research. 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.

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