Marc A Smith

This study investigates how heavily active contributors affect recruitment and retention in online social systems. We find that core enthusiasts are more successful recruiters, their recruits are more likely to become enthusiasts, and interacting with enthusiasts makes users less likely to exit the system. We also find evidence that strong dyadic t...

Dear Colleagues, We are very pleased to announce that DISC 2021 will be held ONLINE via Zoom on June 18-19, 2021. The 6th DISC (Data, Innovation, Social Network & Convergence) 2021 Conference Conference Dates: June 18 - 19, 2021 (JST) Abstract Submissions April 15, 2021 (JST) Conference Organizers Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki (University of Tsukuba, Tsuku...

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World, Second Edition, provides readers with a thorough, practical and updated guide to NodeXL, the open-source social network analysis (SNA) plug-in for use with Excel. The book analyzes social media, provides a NodeXL tutorial, and presents network analysis case studies, all o...

NodeXL (Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration in Excel) is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualization and analysis tool that leverages the widely available MS Excel application as the platform for representing network data, performing advanced network analysis at the node, link, network, and cluster levels, and visual explor...

This paper investigates how scholars in the digital humanities use Twitter for informal scholarly communication. In particular, the paper observes the hosting of an annual conference over a number of years by one association in order to see whether there was a change in the network configuration structure, the influential scholars in the network, t...

As users interact via social media spaces, like Twitter, they form connections that emerge into complex social network structures. These connections are indicators of content sharing, and network structures reflect patterns of information flow. This article proposes a conceptual and practical model for the classification of topical Twitter networks...

Social media comprises a vast and consequential landscape that has been poorly mapped and understood. Hundreds of millions of people have eagerly moved many of the conversations and discussions that compose civil society into these services and platforms. There is a need to document and analyze these social spaces for many academic and commercial p...

Network data are inherently different than traditional datasets and require specialized software to analyze and visualize. New tools, such as NodeXL, are making network analysis increasingly accessible, particularly to nonprogrammers. NodeXL is a free add-in for Microsoft Excel, supported by the Social Media Research Foundation. In this chapter, we...

Social media promises to provide access to a vast variety of human interactions, important and trivial. More than traditional electronic media or interpersonal contact, social media allows people to find and interact based on common interests rather than physical proximity.Billions of people have embraced these tools, entering social media spaces t...

The increasing use of online collaboration and information sharing in the last decade has resulted in explosion of criminal and anti-social activities in online communities. Detection of such behaviors are of interest to commercial enterprises who want to guard themselves from cyber criminals, and the military intelligence analysts who desire to de...

As people use social media they form networks that have several basic forms: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and hub and spoke patterns with in and outward facing links. These patterns are associated with different types of topics and discussions: polarized, in-group, brand, community, broadcast, and support. Since each pattern has specifi...

This tutorial discusses the following: Introduction to social media network analysis with NODEXL; Cloud based federated infrastructure for Big Data e-science and collaboration; Multimodal detection of affective states during collaboration: Overview of methods and applications; Big Data processing with less work and less code parsing semi-structured...

Social network analysis calculates and displays the relationships that exist among a collection of people, like those on a project, in an organization, or participating in a blog. From this analysis, the researcher can find key people, outliers, subgroups, and people who bridge subgroups. And, these analyses can reveal changes over time, for exampl...

Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke...

Marketing campaigns using social media services aim to exploit social connections to propagate messages to potential customers. However, social activities often give rise to multiple network structures and some may be more effective in achieving the communication objectives than others. This led us to investigate a problem: given an observed sequen...

The MediaWiki platform supports popular socio-technical systems such as Wikipedia as well as thousands of other wikis. This software encodes and records a variety of relationships about the content, history, and editors of its articles such as hyperlinks between articles, discussions among editors, and editing histories. These relationships can be...

Twitter users see content mostly from the other users they select to follow. Networks of connected users on Twitter define the set of content to which each user is exposed. We developed a Selective Exposure Cluster (SEC) method to study these connected networks and their discussion patterns in Twitter. To illustrate the SEC method, we collected net...

NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/) is an application that simplifies basic network analysis tasks and supports analysis of social media networks. Using the widely familiar framework of a spreadsheet, NodeXL integrates the features needed to collect, store, analyze, visualize and publish network datasets. The tool connects to a wide range of data...

This study integrates network and content analyses to examine exposure to cross-ideological political views on Twitter. We mapped the Twitter networks of 10 controversial political topics, discovered clusters subgroups of highly self-connected users and coded messages and links in them for political orientation. We found that Twitter users are unli...

Traces of activity left by social media users can shed light on individual behavior, social relationships, and community efficacy. Tools and processes to make sense of social traces are essential for enabling practitioners to study and nurture meaningful and sustainable social interaction. Yet such tools and processes remain in their infancy. This...

What is the relationship between new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the study of global political communication? This article reflects briefly on four important aspects of this complex question. We begin at the most concrete level, outlining several prominent empirical opportunities and challenges created by a globally interc...

The proposed roundtable will bring together researchers from the iSchool community to discuss trends, new questions, and innovative ideas regarding social networks. For instance, how to discover and analyze subcommunities within a very large social network? How new behaviors in on-line social networks emerge through interactions? How social network...

This chapter touches on the key historical developments, ideas, and concepts in social network analysis and applies them to social media network examples. Social network theory and analysis is a relatively recent set of ideas and methods largely developed over the past 80 years. It builds on and uses concepts from the mathematics of graph theory, w...

Social media refers to a set of online tools that supports social interaction between users. In practice, it is a catchall phrase intended to describe the many novel online sociotechnical systems that have emerged in recent years, including services like email, discussion forums, blogs, microblogs, texting, chat, social networking sites, wikis, pho...

Many large social networks are a complex combination of smaller groups or subgraphs. Identifying groups within a network and mapping their relationship to one another can be essential to making intelligent strategic decisions. Network analysis can help identify competing or complementary groups, potential allies to form a powerful group, and indivi...

The profusion of software tools for social network analysis and visualization demonstrates the strength of interest, but many of these tools are difficult to use, particularly for those who lack experience with programming languages. This chapter introduces NodeXL, an open source software tool that was designed especially to facilitate learning the...

Visualizing and making sense of large social media networks can be challenging, particularly if they are densely connected. This chapter describes different strategies for analyzing large network data sets. One strategy is to roll up relationship data into a more summarized form before the analysis and visualization. Another strategy for dealing wi...

This chapter focuses on calculation and visualization of network metrics, with emphasis on use of NodeXL. When trying to understand networks, analysts often want to identify important vertices, locate subgroups, or get a sense of how interconnected a network is compared to other networks. Although visualization itself can help do this, it is often...

Since the inception of the Internet, most virtual communities have relied on asynchronous threaded conversation platforms as a main channel of communication. Usenet newsgroups, email lists, web boards, and discussion forums all contain collections of messages in reply to one another. Although they make use of a wide range of technologies that diffe...

The integration of email into everyday life makes email networks the most accessible, and in many cases most accurate, source of data for mapping actual social and work relationships. Analyzing organizational email networks and email lists can provide a wealth of social information that can inform important decisions and support novel interventions...

This chapter focuses on use of social network analysis to study social media and social networks. Passionate users of social media tools such as email, blogs, microblogs, and wikis eagerly send personal or public messages, post strongly felt opinions, or contribute to community knowledge to develop partnerships, promote cultural heritage, and advan...

Communities in social networks emerge from interactions among individuals and can be analyzed through a combination of clustering and graph layout algorithms. These approaches result in 2D or 3D visualizations of clustered graphs, with groups of vertices representing individuals that form a community. However, in many instances the vertices have at...

This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and so...

EventGraphs are social media network diagrams of conversations related to events, such as conferences. Many conferences now communicate a common "hashtag" or keyword to identify messages related to the event. EventGraphs help make sense of the collections of connections that form when people follow, reply or mention one another and a keyword. This...

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft's NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked...

Analyzing complex online relationships is a difficult job, but new information visualization tools are enabling a wider range of users to make actionable insights from the growing volume of online data. This paper describes the challenges and methods for conducting analyses of threaded conversations such as found in enterprise message boards, email...

Online systems are becoming increasingly social environments in which people share advice and experiences in threaded discussions, photos, videos and other files in systems like Flickr and You Tube, and display details of their social lives through a host of social networking sites. Yet even as these settings provide rich content, that content does...

This study addresses 3 research questions in the context of online political discussions: What is the distribution of successful topic starting practices, what characterizes the content of large thread-starting messages, and what is the source of that content? A 6-month analysis of almost 40,000 authors in 20 political Usenet newsgroups identified...

We present NodeXL, an extendible toolkit for network overview, discovery and exploration implemented as an add-in to the Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet software. We demonstrate NodeXL data analysis and visualization features with a social media data sample drawn from an enterprise intranet social network. A sequence of NodeXL operations from data...

Social media communities (e.g. Wikipedia, Flickr, Live Q&A) give rise to distinct types of content, foremost among which are relational content (discussion, chat) and factual content (answering questions, problem-solving). Both users and researchers are increasingly interested in developing strategies that can rapidly distinguish these types of con...

Both online and off, people frequently perform particular social roles. These roles organize behavior and give structure to positions in local networks. As more of social life becomes embedded in online systems, the concept of social role becomes increasingly valuable as a tool for simplifying patterns of action, recognizing distinct user types, an...

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has evolved as a popular, standard method for modeling meaningful, often hidden structural relationships in communities. Existing SNA tools often involve extensive pre-processing or intensive programming skills that can challenge practitioners and students alike. NodeXL, an open-source template for Microsoft Excel, int...

Broadening adoption of social media applications within the enterprise offers a new and valuable data source for insight into the social structure of organizations. Social media applications generate networks when employees use features to create "friends" or "contact" networks, reply to messages from other users, edit the same documents as others,...

Community based question and answer systems have been promoted as Web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge. This promise depends on systemspsila capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers. Content analysis of dedicated contributorspsila messages in the live QnA system found: (1) few...

Social media communities (e.g. Wikipedia, Flickr, Live Q&A) give rise to distinct types of content, foremost among which are relational content (discussion, chat) and factual content (answering questions, problem-solving). Both users and researchers are increasingly interested in developing strategies that can rapidly distinguish these types of con...

In this report, we summarize the contents and outcomes of the recent SNAKDD 2008 workshop on Social Network Min- ing and Analysis that was held in conjunction with the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Dis- covery and Data Mining (KDD 2008), August 24-27, 2008, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The SNAKDD 2008 is the second in a successful...

Social media are constructed from the collective contributions of potentially millions of individuals and present an increasingly common and large scale form of database. As these databases grow in social and technical importance exploration of their structure is needed. The social nature of much of this data is an added opportunity and challenge,...

This study investigates how heavily active contributors affect recruitment and retention in online social systems. We find that core enthusiasts are more successful recruiters, their recruits are more likely to become enthusiasts, and interacting with enthusiasts makes users less likely to exit the system. We also find evidence that strong dyadic t...

Several years of consulting with online community hosts and managers have highlighted a variety of issues that recur across many online community development efforts. We summarize those issues in eight points that have functioned as useful guidelines to working with online communities, particularly within a corporate context. These recommendations...

The ability to utilize and benet from today's explosion of social media sites depends on providing tools that allow users to productively participate. In order to participate, users must be able to nd resources (both people and in- formation) that they nd valuable. Here, we argue that in order to do this eectiv ely, we should make use of a user's \...

The creation and distribution of data sets is a core practice of the natural sciences. The combined shift of much of social life into computer-mediated channels of communication along with the growing proliferation of mobile devices capable of generating yet more detailed data about social life and behavior beyond the keyboard and mouse is likely t...

Systems for computer-mediated interaction provide unprecedented research opportunities for social scientists. The scale and complexity of these data also pose practical and theoretical challenges regarding data management, aggregation, analysis, and inference. This chapter discusses these challenges and describes a series of techniques that help re...

Email archives are full of social information, including how messages are addressed and frequency of contact between senders and receivers. To study the use of this rich metadata for email management, particularly email triage, we deployed SNARF, a prototype tool which uses social metadata to organize received email by correspondent, sort received...

Social roles in online discussion forums can be described by patterned characteristics of communication between network members which we conceive of as 'structural signatures'. This paper uses visualization methods to reveal these structural signatures and regression analysis to confirm the relationship between these signatures and their associated...

We consider trails to be a document type of growing importance, authored in abundance as locative technologies become embedded in mobile devices carried by billions of humans. As these trail documents become annotated by communities of users, the resulting data sets can provide support for a host of services. In this paper we describe our sociotech...

While applications are typically optimized for traditional desktop interfaces using a keyboard and mouse, there are a variety of compelling reasons to consider alternative input mechanisms that require more physical exertion, including promoting fitness, preventing Repetitive Strain Injuries, and encouraging fun. We chose to explore physical interf...

Understanding the social roles of the members a group can help to understand the social context of the group. We present a method of applying social network analysis to support the task of characterizing authors in Usenet newsgroups. We compute and visualize networks created by patterns of replies for each author in selected newsgroups and find tha...

Are people who remain active as webloggers more socially con- nected to other users? How are the number and nature of social ties related to people's willingness to continue contributing con- tent to a weblog? This study uses longitudinal data taken from Wallop, a weblogging system developed by Microsoft Research, to explore patterns of user activi...