Networks Based on Social Roles

Network diagrams have always been interesting to me. Charting and analyzing the flow of dialogue based on social roles gives us a bit more insight into the phenomenon of social networking.  I've been making my way through some work that a community guru and master communicator Marc Smith:

"...presented at the ICWSM 2008 in Seattle (International Conference on Web Logs and Social Media) and the 2007 Communities and Technologies conference at Michigan State University.

A paper we recently published in the Journal of Social Structure: “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups” is available from: http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume8/Welser/"

As I make my way through the syllabus Marc provided I see this network visualization that is more than analytical, it is truly a piece of art too:

This is a recently released directed graph network charting add-in for Excel. These tools and others are available from our Web site: (http://www.research.microsoft.com/community/projects.aspx). I have a lot more to read, but using the research venues in this post so far, I suspect you could spend most of your holiday weekend gaining insight.

Cheers,

JaAG