• Who in Congress talks to Each Other?

    by libbyh • February 7, 2013 • 0 Comments

    On Twitter, at least, most of the communication is between members of the same party. That’s not all that surprising given the polarized Congress and a slew of recent social science findings about homogeneous connections among users. I still think it’s interesting though. A couple months ago I blogged about using geometric mean instead of...

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    UPDATED: Why didn’t the isolates go away?

    by libbyh • January 30, 2013 • 0 Comments

    I’m giving in. I’m finally learning how to do social network analysis R. What made me switch (from only UCINet and NodeXL)? Well, all my data lives in a MySQL database, and I have networks with millions of edges. R makes it really easy to connect to MySQL and create a data frame from...

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    I’m so ready for the gay #gayzzoli #Rizzles #RizzoliOnIsles

    by libbyh • December 13, 2012 • 0 Comments

    The title from this post is actually a tweet posted by Twitter user GayzzoliForever just before Tuesday night’s Rizzoli and Isles episode aired on the East Coast. I’ve been studying Twitter and watching Rizzoli and Isles for a few years, and this week I decided to give myself some time to work on a fun...

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    CSCW paper and poster about Congress on Twitter

    by libbyh • December 6, 2012 • 0 Comments

    My colleagues and I will present a paper and a poster at CSCW 2013 in San Antonio in February. Both submissions are based on data we collected from Twitter around politicians and their use of social media. What’s Congress Doing on Twitter? (paper) With Jahna Otterbacher and Matt Shapiro, this paper reports our first...

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    Calculating Geometric Mean in NodeXL

    by libbyh • November 28, 2012 • 2 Comments

    My social networks reading group read De Choudury et al’s WWW’10 paper about inferring social networks from email (citation’s below) this week, and I was inspired by our discussion to calculate geometric means for Twitter mentions. You can read elsewhere about the public officials and social media project, but basically I have a bunch...

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    RE: Social Media Is Bullshit

    by libbyh • October 10, 2012 • 0 Comments

    BJ Mendelson wrote a book. He called it Social Media is Bullshit so people would buy it and those who didn’t would get his point anyway. This isn’t a review of the book. You can read lots of those. Instead, this is a note-style post about stuff from BJ’s book that come up in my research (and...

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    #drought12 and #climategate Twitter Explorers

    by libbyh • August 31, 2012 • 0 Comments

    My brother sent me an interesting story from NPR about how farmers are using social media to keep track of what’s happening to others’ crops, and it got me thinking about whether I could get some sort of data explorer running on the fly when a new hashtag pops up. For the Public Officials...

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    Congress Hashtag Networks

    by libbyh • August 22, 2012 • 0 Comments

    This morning, I led an hour of WebShop 2012. At the beginning of the talk, I asked the audience, especially students, to brainstorm questions about public officials and Twitter, specifically. You can see the list we generated as a Google doc. Many of those questions my colleagues and I are already investigating, but like I...

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    Summer of NSF Workshops

    by libbyh • August 6, 2012 • 0 Comments

    I’ve been lucky enough this summer to be invited to two NSF workshops. The first, the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST) Summer Institute wrapped up last Thursday and was an incredible experience. CSST’s summer institute for doctoral students and pre-tenure faculty covers a range of topics from community-building to getting tenure...

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    U.S. Congressional Mention Networks

    by libbyh • July 11, 2012 • 0 Comments

    I used the Twitter Database Server and my own Twitter-collectors to gather 42,813 tweets posted by 417 elected members of Congress (69 Senators and 348 Representatives) between December 22, 2011 and March 15, 2012. From those tweets, I made a network based on when Members of Congress mentioned each other and used NodeXL to analyze and graph the...

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    One-mode Projections in NodeXL

    by libbyh • May 14, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Many of the networks I retrieve and analysis are two-mode affiliation networks – meaning they’re networks of people connected to share objects or communities. For instance, Senators using the #gopconference hashtag on Twitter, where I’ll have an edgelist of Senators and the hashtags they use. NodeXL, my free network analysis software of choice, doesn’t currently...

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    Public Officials and Social Media talks at MPSA

    by libbyh • April 6, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Next week the Midwest Political Science Association meets in Chicago, and I’ll be presenting two papers. Here’s my schedule (locations TBD), abstracts after the jump: Thursday, April 12, 8:30am Social Media and Other Web-based Networks Doing What I Say: Connecting Congressional Social Media Behavior and Congressional Voting Friday, April 13, 10:25am State, Urban and...

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