Visual representation of social networks in Excel

According to the spirit of attending the OPCs meeting-"Other people's conferences", the meeting is not about the demographic/professional group, but where you are invited-I am currently attending the Microsoft Research Institute Summit. I'm not a computer scientist, I'm not a college teacher, I have not done any research funded by Microsoft ..., but all of this is so reasonable and enjoyable, because it is a very interesting gathering to find research topics in the field of computer research, with attention and attention to the study of social networks , some of the things that interest me so much. Although I do not do any positive research work on this field and research subject.

The Focus on social networking research helps explain why I am now sitting in a crowded conference room, learning the expansion of Excel software. Even at Microsoft's meetings, Excel's extended functionality is not usually as focused as it is now. However, this extended feature, Netmap, has been developed by Mark Smith (Marc A. Smith), a pioneer in social networking studies, who has analyzed the relationship between social networks and previous Usenet groups during Microsoft Research, and has done a great deal of analytical work.

Recently, a lot of research work has been focused on the behavioral patterns in Usenet newsgroups that seek technical support. As it turns out, these groups are still very important to those looking for technical support (even in the context of today's spam messages) and Microsoft is interested in developing these social networks. Smith and his team no longer cared about and analyzed the contents of the Usenet (because the content was huge and difficult to do), instead they began to care about the structure. They do a lot of web graphics, use graphs to characterize these posts and respond to responses, and look for behavioral structures that appear in them. There are at least three types of behavioral structures present: replying or replying to someone else ——-these people have almost never published a new topic, but answered a large number of unrelated people's inquiries. In the network behavior aspect, they have the very high pay and very low recovery degree. These people are very important and essential people in technology-based newsgroups because they can provide the necessary support and assistance to newcomers.

People who get responses and responses--some people seem to have a talent, or a skill, because the posts or topics they post can always get the attention and response of others. This type of person is just one aspect of answering others. They are constantly releasing topics or posts, while others will give them a reply. Smith believes that there are about 0.5 of these types of people in the newsgroup. These people's postings will receive about 30% of the 30% of the news ancestor's users. Basically, these people are experts on the subject because they have the ability to nominate issues that are more successful than regular users.

Discussion people--they both post posts and answer posts, and they keep in touch with most people over the long term. They are the most basic and typical members of the discussion group, but they are much more common than we thought. If we can analyze these types of discussions further and carefully, we can define them as different ecosystems based on the ecosystem that users live in. Of course, the roles and roles are likely to change over time, and so far, Mark observes, most people seem to remain in their roles, but as time goes by, they become less active. It will be interesting to see if there are some networks that allow people to interact more actively over time. (For example: Facebook)

When social media becomes the dominant online media, we will go from anonymity to the "real-name" Internet, and the content created in the network typically represents a true identity, Smith said. So we're going to get those incredible sets of data that can be used by social scientists to do research. Because "all social media are in touch," and "Our relationship is constantly documenting itself." "There are a number of problems here, and as data becomes more and more readily available and discovered, it is difficult to present and characterize the way in which it is meaningful." Smith points out that there are a number of handy Java toolkits that can be used to document social network mapping relationships, but strangely, there is no such feature in Excel. So he and his team members build a--netmap that can be downloaded in C Odeplex, and you can get a network diagram of what you want by using their tools to enter relationships and data in E xcel. Integrated with Windows integration, this tool provides a cool demonstration feature that retrieves your personal social network based on the interactive data you use to retrieve your email index. "." So, one thing will become very clear: if you want to get these pictures, you only need some very simple e-XCEL operations, and you have the possibility of acquiring a visual representation that can be represented in a variety of ways, expressing the strongest possible relationship. As Mark said in his conversation, one of his collaborators extracted a set of data from Digg to prove that there was no small, competitive group on Digg, and that they were tightly confined to a discussion topic. Digg is all about being a highly active user, and they are actively talking about different topics, which is the core of Digg.

I'm looking forward to using this tool, but at the moment it's a bit disappointing that it's currently available only for Windows. I am concerned that many social scientists may be using other alternative platforms, and I hope that the research work of the project will be able to move beyond the current research space and integration into the mainstream of research, and it would receive wider support.

This text was originally published in the personal blog of Ethan Zuckerman, my Heart's in Accra.