Marc A. Smith

July 22, 9:00-5:00, Wallenberg Hall  $100

Bring a laptop (running Windows and Office 2007 or 2010) to this workshop and you can be analyzing a social media network from systems like Twitter, flickr, YouTube and your own email by the end of the day.  If you can make a pie-chart in Excel, using the free and open NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) you can now make a rich network graph from data extracted from social media systems and other common formats.  If you have a network, bring it, if not you can bring a suggested topic that we can map during the course of the day.

Even if you leave your laptop behind or have a Mac (sorry, no version is yet available for MacOS - unless you have a virtual machine with Windows and Office) this workshop will introduce the core concepts of network science with application to social networks in general and social media networks in particular. Applied to a range of topics and services, social media network maps can illuminate a variety of "publics" - populations who share a common interest and may share connections.  Maps of topics like "oil spill", "global warming" and other issue and event related keywords can reveal the groups and factions that cluster around different concepts and terms.  Key contributors in these maps can be identified through the application of network measurements that capture various aspects of a  person's location in a network graph.

Dr. Marc A. Smith

Chief Social Scientist
Connected Action Consulting Group
marc@connectedaction.net
http://www.connectedaction.net
http://delicious.com/marc_smith/
http://www.twitter.com/marc_smith
http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith
http://www.facebook.com/marc.smith.sociologist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcasmith

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: Insights from a connected world, a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions (forthcoming Summer 2010 on Morgan-Kaufmann).

Smith’s research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many “groups” in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://delicious.com/marc_smith/Paper). 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. He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. A tutorial on social network analysis is evolving into a book and is freely available (http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching). NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, twitter, flickr, and other network data sets.

The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories. Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible.

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.