2014年10月17日星期五

Let's Start Analyzing with NodeXL

In the sixth lecture of Social Media Analysis, we've learnt that social network can be viewed as a graph that describes the relations among a group of people. In the Graphs, vertices are used to represent an individual while edges are the concept to identify the direct connections between vertices.

During the class, Prof. Chan introduced a useful tool called NodeXL, which is a free, open-source template for Microsoft Excel 2007,2010 and 2013 that makes it easy to explore network graphs.

After the class, I used NodeXL to help me find out the twitters who send tweets with the keyword "CUHK" from the location of Hong Kong in the past one week and their netwok information as well.

Here is the graph I output by using NodeXL at the first place, we can see there are too many nodes (vertices) and lines (edges) on the graph and it is difficult to observe any information from it.



Then I adopt the Groups function to group the vertices by clusters and layout the graph by each cluster. 


Now can you find out the centrality, in-degree/out-degree and the betweenness/closeness information from it ? 

As a matter of fact, this is the first time for me to use NodeXL. What surprised me is that NodeXL integrates the API interface with some popular social network website already.  

 If you find it interesting , you can check this tutorial video online to learn more about NodeXL (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC-PgkhpsNc) to learn more about NodeXL :)


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20 条评论:

  1. FRANK SUN2014年10月21日 00:18

    I am so agreed with you. NodeXL is a very useful tool to learn. And through this lecture, I also gained a lot of knowledge to analyze the social media by this tool. I also do some practice, and I know how to present the degree, in-degree, out-degree by this tool. Please check my homepage. http://sunwenxin-iems5723.blogspot.hk/
    Thanks.

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    1. Unknown2014年10月25日 19:27

      Hi Frank,
      I visited your blog and learnt more about NodeXL from your post.

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  2. 324324234432014年11月6日 20:06

    Hi, I am amazed by the thing you did with NodeXL, seems that the tool is really powerful, I haven't got time to give it a try since the lecture. Now I am trying to kick a start, thats very nice of you to share the tutorial, it's very useful:).

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  3. Unknown2014年11月9日 23:02

    Hey dear! Thanks so much for sharing the detailed process of using NodeXL in the social media analysis. It gave me some new ideas about the wide use of this software in various fields. I think it is really powerful and useful. Hope to study with you in details soon.

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  4. Unknown2014年11月13日 00:08

    Hello, I am attracted by the pictures you posted. You showed us how powerful NodeXL is! I think NodeXL is really useful for social media analysis. In addition, I guess that the assignment 3 will probably require us to use NodeXL. I will try to practice it as soon as possible. Thanks for your sharing!

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  5. Unknown2014年11月14日 04:12

    As we discussed in our project meeting, this tool is really useful, for example, it can help us find a series of information about the same theme, which do the data collection work. And recently, I have been studying on its advanced function, hope to contribute to our project:)

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    1. Unknown2014年11月20日 08:51

      As your teammate I'm so happy to see you work so hard on the project. I'm so concerned about the limitation of nodeXL if it can help to analyze the data in some specific period

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  6. Unknown2014年11月16日 19:41

    This tool is very convenient to us. Just like you cited before, it integrates some social network API already. So we don't need to extract data by ourselves which could be difficult sometimes. Thanks for sharing.

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  7. AliceCHENG2014年11月17日 01:52

    NodeXL is really a useful tool for social media analytics. It can directly find tweets contain a specific keyword with a specific location in a specific period. And I think the function that group the vertices by clusters and layout the graph by each cluster is very friend. It even has already integrated the API interface with some popular social network website. I think it's the exactly tools we want to use.

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  8. Unknown2014年11月19日 03:21

    此评论已被作者删除。

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  9. Unknown2014年11月20日 07:44

    NodeXL is quite a magnificent tool for engender social network graph.And you have realised quite a great application after class. I can't wait try it on my computer.However,the nodes and the vertices are still not easy to read,we can only get the feeling of the density ,closeness of the graph. Still,it provides us with a more intuitive feeling about the whole structure.

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    1. Unknown2014年11月20日 08:54

      Hi cicy
      i do also have the same feeling with you. I do not think nodeXL would be a proper tool to analyze the big data. But maybe there are more powerful function we do not know yet.

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  10. Unknown2014年11月20日 09:43

    Thanks for your sharing. nodeXL really help us a lot in project for that it could crap the data directly from twitter and other social media.It is really helpful that the API integrated with Twitter and other mainstream social media helps the analyst, especially those who are not able to program a piece of crawler. The visualization of the relationship and quantity are really fabulous!

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  11. Unknown2014年11月20日 18:45

    Thanks for sharing. It's really good practice of NodeXL!! NodeXL has integrated twitter API, so it's useful to collect data in this tool.

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  12. Unknown2014年11月20日 18:52

    A brilliant software can always make our life easier. Undoubtedly, NodeXL just one of them. I notice that the same infornmation when you output in different way, it also show us different thing, mess or not. Sometimes changing a view is quite important to us.

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  13. Unknown2014年11月20日 18:57

    Hi~Lin,
    What you've tried with the NodeXL is amazing. I haven't use that software yet but after seeing what you did with it, I wanna try it to analyze some data by myself. I think it's a very useful and powerful tool~

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  14. Unknown2014年11月21日 03:59

    Thanks for your sharing. In your blog, I learned that NodeXL is really a excellent and useful tool to make it easy to explore network graphs. I noticed your have used CUHK as an example to test the tool, through your example, I cannot wait to use it on my computer.

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  15. SONG Xinrui2014年11月21日 04:36

    Thank you for your sharing.In this blog ,I have known that In Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL, members of the NodeXL development team up to provide readers with a thorough and practical guide for using the tool while also explaining the development behind each feature. Blending the theoretical with the practical, this book applies specific SNA instructions directly to NodeXL, but the theory behind the implementation can be applied to any SNA.

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  16. Unknown2014年11月21日 05:04

    Thanks for sharing. As we know, NodeXL is a free, open-source template for Microsoft Excel 2007,2010 and 2013 that makes it easy to explore network graphs. It is excellent in the process and visualization of the data from the social network. Actually NodeXL integrates the API interface with some popular social network website already, but Weibo excluded. Anyway, many thx for sharing this splendid tool to us.

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    1. Unknown2014年11月21日 06:47

      Yes you are right, but my concern is the capability of the NodeXL. In my practice, I only did the research based on the data got in 7 days from twitter. What I am not sure is whether we can set up the period as one month ago or ever earlier.

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