By: J.D. Ross
(315) 443-3094
Analyzing social media may be a daunting task, given its overwhelming size and messy, unstructured nature. For those new to analyzing social behavior in online systems, there are any number of pitfalls that make it challenging to find the meaning in the mess.
Shelly Farnham of the FUSE Labs division of Microsoft Research will present a session on December 3rd to provide practical instructions for collecting and analyzing social media using the Microsoft So.cl Research Dataset as a case study, highlighting special considerations when analyzing behavioral or conversational data.
Microsoft's So.cl is an experimental social media web site from FUSE Labs that integrates search with social networking to enable users to share and connect around their interests. It now has over 300,000 registered users, about 13,000 active each month.
In developing So.cl as an experimental platform Microsoft has instrumented the system to log social behaviors, and is making that dataset publicly available for research purposes.
The goal of this session is to provide practical instructions for collecting and analyzing social media using the So.cl Research Dataset as a case study, highlighting special considerations when analyzing behavioral or conversational data.
Data clean up and analysis of usage behaviors will be illustrated using SPSS, statistical software commonly used by social scientists, and well-adapted for behavioral analyses. Social network analysis will be illustrated using NodeXL, an Excel plug-in which may be downloaded for free and easily used by both novices and experts. These lessons for preparing social media data for analyses may be adapted for other, common analytical tools.
The session will be held on December 3rd at Noon in the Katzer Room (347) in Hinds Hall – all are welcome to attend.
Shelly Farnham has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Washington, and is a researcher specializing in social media at Microsoft Research. Through her drive to have a real world, meaningful impact on people's lives, she has worked primarily in industry research focusing on innovation in social technologies, including social networking, match-making, online communities, and mobile social coordination. As a key component of the prototyping and evaluation process she has many years of experience analyzing behavioral data in social systems