Tech Report HCIL-2009-11

Smith, M., Shneiderman, B., Milic-Frayling, N., Rodrigues, E., Barash, V., Dunne, C., Capone, T., Perer, A., Gleave, E. (April 2009)
Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL
Proc. Communities & Technologies Conference, Springer (June 2009).
HCIL-2009-11

We present NodeXL, an extendible toolkit for network overview, discovery and exploration implemented as an add-in to the Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet software. We demonstrate NodeXL data analysis and visualization features with a social media data sample drawn from an enterprise intranet social network. A sequence of NodeXL operations from data import to computation of network statistics and refinement of network visualization through sorting, filtering, and clustering functions is described. These operations reveal sociologically relevant differences in the patterns of interconnection among employee participants in the social media space. The tool and method can be broadly applied.