Charting collections of connections in social media: creating visualizations with NodeXL

Abstract

Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections. Analyzing these networks involves understanding the complex relationships between individuals, as well as any attributes, statistics, or groupings associated with them. The Social Media Research Foundation's NodeXL project makes network analysis accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, network visualizations become as easy to create as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A NodeXL tutorial and visualizations of various networks will be presented, along with new techniques for text analysis and simplifying your network visualizations.