20110830 introducing the social media research foundation
DESCRIPTION
Description of the activities and goals of the Social Media Research Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to Open Tools, Open Data, and Open Scholarship. See: http://www.smrfoundation.org.One project from the Social Media Research Foundation is NodeXL, the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel 2007/2010. See: http://www.smrfoundation.orgTRANSCRIPT
Who we arePeople Disciplines Institutions
University Faculty
Computer Science University of Maryland
Students HCI, CSCW Oxford Internet Institute
Industry Machine Learning Stanford University
Independent Information Visualization Microsoft Research
Researchers UI/UX Illinois Institute of Technology
Developers Social Science/Sociology Connected Action
Network Analysis Cornell
Collective Action Morningside Analytics
What we are trying to do:Open Tools, Open Data, Open Scholarship
• Build the “Firefox of GraphML” – open tools for collecting and visualizing social media data
• Connect users to network analysis – make network charts as easy as making a pie chart
• Connect researchers to social media data sources• Archive: Be the “Allen Very Large Telescope Array”
for Social Media data – coordinate and aggregate the results of many user’s data collection and analysis
• Create open access research papers & findings• Make “collections of connections” easy for users to
manage
What we have done: Open Tools
• NodeXL• Data providers (“spigots”)– ThreadMill Message Board– Exchange Enterprise Email– Voson Hyperlink– SharePoint– Facebook– Twitter– YouTube– Flickr
What we have done: Open Data
• NodeXLGraphGallery.org– User generated collection of
network graphs, datasets and annotations
– Collective repository for the research community
– Published collections of data from a range of social media data sources to help students and researchers connect with data of interest and relevance
What we have done: Open Scholarship• Webshop 2011: NSF, Google, Intel– 4 Days, 45 Students, 20 Speakers– Great tweets!
• Webshop 2012!– Expand numbers of students and add a day– Support speakers and student workers
• Workshops: Purdue, Maryland, Cape Town, Yeungnam
What we have done: Open Scholarship
What we want to do: (Build the tools to) map the social web• Move NodeXL to the web:
– Node for Google Doc Spreadsheets!– WebGL Canvas
• Connect to more data sources of interest:– RDF, MediaWikis, Gmail, NYT, Citation Networks
• Solve hard network manipulation UI problems:– Modal transform, Time series, Automated layouts
• Grow and maintain archives of social media network data sets for research use.
• Improve network science education:– Workshops on social media network analysis– Live lectures and presentations– Videos and training materials
2012 Schedule: Planned Workshops
January 2012 - Syracuse UniversityMarch 2012 – SunbeltJune 2012 - ICWSMJuly 2012 – Lipari School on ComplexityAugust 2012 – Webshop 2012
Work ItemsAutofill Group AttributeMerge Edges by AttributeModal TransformMerge WorkbooksAutomated Dynamic Filters: Time Series Analysis, contrastCaptions and LegendsUpload to Graph Gallery++: captions, workbookGraph Gallery++
User Accounts, Reporting, RSS Feeds, Network Visualization Web Canvas
Import: RDF, Wiki, SharePoint, Keyword networks from textMetrics: Triad CensusLayouts:
Force Atlas 2, Lin Log, “Bakshy Plots”, Quality MeasuresQuery-by-example search for network structures
How you can help
• Sponsor a feature• Sponsor Webshop 2012• Sponsor a student• Schedule training• Sponsor the foundation• Donate your money, code, computation, storage,
bandwidth, data or employee’s time• Help promote the work of the Social Media
Research Foundation
Thank you!
The Social Media Research Foundation
http://www.smrfoundation.org