LR Update

Just a shortish one - another good day, despite less time to work on research today I have been able to find some more excellent articles. What I'm finding is that as I find things for one section of the LR it is leading to uncover things that are useful for other sections. For example, today when researching academic writing on microblogging, references to viral marketing came up. It is too simplistic to think - 'I will just write this section today' - it is much more fluid and cross-pollenating a process than that!!

I'm working on a spreadsheet as well to help visualised the cross-referencing between the papers that I am using so that I can easily find the papers that are more cited by others in the field and also guard against gaps in knowledge of the field of study. It takes a bit of time but now that I have it up and running the papers that I read from now on will be more easily added to it & it should make my life easier! I do need to sort out my account with Refwords so that doesn't become a headache as well in terms of the references. That reminds me - my account with VOSON (mentioned 2-3 posts back) has been granted so I can now go ahead with testing that alongside NodeXl next week.

Anyway, I'm now going to cook in time for the family coming to visit for the weekend. Won't be working tomorrow but have lots of reading to do - yay!

Literature Review Update

Today's aim was to gather more research articles for my Literature Review which I am working on whilst also gathering data for analysis (alluded to below with pretty pictures..).

Apart from a saga involving an ATM eating my bank card which lasted 3 hours (all I wanted was a bite to eat for lunch) I've made some good progress. Some of the most interesting articles which I have located today have been on Twitter; how it is used, how it may be used in the future (as well as the web as whole) and how it was formed. I am planning a section on Microblogging and Twitter itself for my LR. As well as more general research, it is important that I present the academic research already carried out on and using Twitter.

Another of the more useful articles is on Religions going online (although slightly dated as it is 10 years old) and I have found a potentially interesting tool for improving the data collection process: VOSON (Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks) which is a tool developed by The Australian National University. This can dovetail with the NodeXl addition to Excel (mentioned in previous posts) which could be really useful - we shall see.

Further Social Network Visualisations

Today I've been able to get quite a lot more data for eco-centric networks. The images on the left show some more complex social networks (not particularly well arranged) which give an insight into the sort of visualisations that can be created using the NodeXl tool.

These are both simple eco-centric networks which show how one user (me for example) follows others, these others may also be following me. Some of the people I follow also follow each other - hence the rather hectic lines connecting all the different actors in the network. These samples are limited to >200 people but each dot represents an account or person. The size of the dot in these visualisations has been defined by the 'betweeness centrality' value which it has within the network i.e. '..how many of the shortest paths between two others some actor lies on'. The colour of the dots has been defined by their Eigenvector Centrality - how important that actor is within the network. These can now be used to compare with other networks and to represent many other characteristics of the network visually.