Software

NodeXL is the free and open add-in for Excel that supports network overview, discovery and exploration. The code and application can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl.

A tutorial guide to NodeXL can be found at http://casci.umd.edu/images/4/46/NodeXL_tutorial_draft.pdf

Supporting data sets can be found at http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching.

NodeXL allows for the import of network data in the form of edge lists, matricies, graphML, UCINet, and Pajek files along with CSV and other workbooks.

Leveraging the assets of Excel 2007, NodeXL allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs. Filtering and display attributes can be used to highlight important structures in the network.

NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, twitter, flickr and soon, facebook.

Recent features added to NodeXL include faster metrics calculation, larger data sets, new layouts, scales, axes, and legends.

NodeXL has been downloaded more than 12,000 times and is becoming the easiest path to getting insights from network data.

Marc Smith
Chief Social Scientist
Telligent Systems
(for Team NodeXL)

You may be interested in the news that I have decided to leave Telligent effective very soon.

I will be leading the Connected Action Consulting Group here in Silicon Valley. We will offer social media research, analysis and strategy consulting services. We continue to develop the NodeXL project, for example. NodeXL now has improved support for extracting networks from Twitter, flickr, and email.

See:

• www.codeplex.com/nodexl
• www.connectedaction.net

marc@connectedaction.net

NodeXL Publications

Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL
Smith, M., Shneiderman, B., Milic-Frayling, N., Rodrigues, E.M., Barash, V., Dunne, C., Capone, T., Perer, A. & Gleave, E. (2009),"Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL", In C&T '09: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies. Springer.

Abstract: In this paper we present NodeXL, an extendible toolkit for network data analysis and visualization, implemented as an add-in to the Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet software. We demonstrate NodeXL features through analysis of a data sample drawn from an enterprise intranet social network, discussion, and wiki. Through a sequence of steps we show how NodeXL leverages and extends the broadly used spreadsheet paradigm to support common operations in network analysis. This ranges from data import to computation of network statistics and refinement of network visualization through a selection of ready-to-use sorting, filtering, and clustering functions.

Whither the Experts Howard Welser, Eric Gleave, Marc Smith, Vladimir Barash, Jessica Meckes. "Whither the Experts? Social affordances and the cultivation of experts in community Q&A systems", in SIN '09: Proc. international symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Abstract: Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge. This promise depends on systems� capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers. Content analysis of dedicated contributors� messages in the Live QnA system found: (1) few contributors who focused on providing technical answers (2) a preponderance of attention paid to opinion and discussion, especially in non-technical threads. This paucity of experts raises an important general question: how do the social affordances of a site alter the ecology of roles found there? Using insights from recent research in online community, we generate a series of expectations about how social affordances are likely to alter the role ecology of online systems.

Here are additional NODEXL Publications