[Air-L] NodeXL Workshop and Pointers

[Derek Hansen]

Colleagues,

Marc Smith (Telligent Systems) and I (Derek Hansen, University of
Maryland) will be running a workshop on NodeXL as part of the
Communities and Technologies conference next week in University Park,
PA. We have room for additional participants. If anyone is interested,
please email me (shakmatt at gmail.com) or Marc
(marc.smith at telligent.com).

Even if you aren't attending, I wanted to point out that we've been
working on a NodeXL tutorial that I'd be willing to share with others,
particularly those who are planning on teaching social network
analysis. The tutorial covers the basics of NodeXL using sample
datasets and briefly describes some of the key social network
concepts. It takes about 4-5 hours to complete with students following
along. Please email me offline if you are interested
(shakmatt at umd.edu). I've used NodeXL in my Master's level online
communities course and found it was much more approachable than other
SNA tools and gave them a new way of thinking about community
structure.

See details for the June 24 event below:

Title: NodeXL: Social Network Analysis and Visualization tools for
Social Media Date/Time: Wednesday, June 24, 8:30am through early
afternoon Place: Penn State University, University Park, PA (see
http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/index.cfm)

Organizers:
Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Telligent Systems -
(Marc.Smith at telligent.com)
Derek Hansen, Assistant Professor, iSchool, University of Maryland -
(dlhansen at umd.edu)

NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network
diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet. Adding the
directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for
easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties.
In this tutorial the steps needed to install and operate NodeXL for
Office 2007 are reviewed. The NodeXL add-in provides directed graph
charting features within Excel, allowing users to create node-link
diagrams with control over each node and edge color, size,
transparency and shape. Since NodeXL builds within Excel, all of the
controls and programmatic features of Office are available. Additional
features of NodeXL generate social networks from social media data
sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop
Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system.

Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be
visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. This session will provide a walk
through the basic operation of NodeXL. Attendees are encouraged to
bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets will be provided. To
download the NodeXL Add-in and slides, go to:
http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL.

Derek Hansen
Assistant Professor, Maryland's iSchool
Director, CASCI (http://casci.umd.edu)