Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto
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Department of Informatics Engineering
INVITED TALK
Place: room B010, FEUP
Date: March 26th, 2010
Time: 12:00-13:00
Talk Title:
Analyzing Internet Social Media: Visualizing the Social Networks in Computer Networks
(Open to the public, no need to register)
This talk will be followed by a hands-on workshop on social media network analysis in NodeXL. If you'd like to register for the workshop please visit this page.
Speaker
Dr. Marc A. Smith
Chief Social Scientist
Connected Action Consulting Group
marc@connectedaction.net
http://www.connectedaction.net
Abstract
Social media systems on the Internet are sociologically interesting: why do some online groups succeed where others fail? How do different collections of online media and populations of authors differ from one another? How do patterns of contribution vary and how do these differences illustrate the roles people play within their communities? Several visualizations of patterns of contribution and connection in a range of Internet social media including web boards, enterprise social networks services, and personal email are presented to illustrate the range of variation among social media repositories and between types of contributors. These images suggest that a more comprehensive overview of social media can generate sociologically relevant findings, improve community management tasks as well as provide features that can improve search and ranking of user generated content. A freely available tool, NodeXL (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl), will be demonstrated to perform basic social media network analysis tasks. Extending these tools to include mobile social software (“mososo”) data sets is a major new direction. In the not too distant future, mobile devices will possess a range of sensors and become more “socially aware”. When phones routinely notice each other the nature of social interaction will change dramatically. How will places and locations change when machines become socially aware? In this talk, sociologist Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Connected Action Consulting Group, a provider of social media analysis platforms and services, will describe these new technologies and some ways of thinking about their implications.
Short Bio
 | 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. 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”, a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions. Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in Social Theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an affiliate faculty at the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University. |