As people increasingly participate in online communities for social, commercial, and civic interaction, new methods are needed to study these phenomena. Social network analysis (SNA) makes a valuable contribution to social media research and data journalism by providing a language and measures for sets of complex relationships created from patterns of online communication. This short course provides an overview of the SNA tool NodeXL Pro and demonstrates through theory and practical case studies its application to research and journalism, particularly on social media and digital interaction. Upon completion of this course, participants will
- understand the basics of SNA, its terminology and background
- know how to conduct a SNA on any set of network data (data import, community clustering,
influencer detection, content analysis, sentiment analysis, time series analysis, visualization) - create and visualize network datasets with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia data
NodeXL is a plug-in for Microsoft Office Excel and supports all features to conduct a professional social network analysis (SNA). All steps can be automated with a single click which makes it easy to use for non-programmers. Here is an example of a network analysis and visualization of the Twitter hashtag #ddj: https://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Graph.aspx?graphID=190206
Requirements
- Laptop with Windows Operating System, Microsoft Office Excel 2010/2013/2016/365
- Twitter account, Facebook account to download data
- NodeXL Pro user license (a free 2-month trial user license will be provided for participants)
- Attention Mac users: NodeXL Pro is Windows OS only. Mac users need to install a remote
virtual machine with Amazon Web Services. This process may take about 30 minutes. Here is a link with instructions: https://www.smrfoundation.org/2018/01/02/using-nodexl-in-the- cloud/
