Colleagues, Marc Smith (Telligent Systems) and I (Derek Hansen, University of Maryland) will be running a workshop on NodeXL as part of the Communities and Technologies conference next week in University Park, PA. We have room for additional participants. If anyone is interested, please email me (shakmatt@gmail.com) or Marc (marc.smith@telligent.com). Even if you aren't attending, I wanted to point out that we've been working on a NodeXL tutorial that I'd be willing to share with others, particularly those who are planning on teaching social network analysis. The tutorial covers the basics of NodeXL using sample datasets and briefly describes some of the key social network concepts. It takes about 4-5 hours to complete with students following along. Please email me offline if you are interested (shakmatt@umd.edu). I've used NodeXL in my Master's level online communities course and found it was much more approachable than other SNA tools and gave them a new way of thinking about community structure. See details for the June 24 event below: Title: NodeXL: Social Network Analysis and Visualization tools for Social Media Date/Time: Wednesday, June 24, 8:30am through early afternoon Place: Penn State University, University Park, PA (see http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/index.cfm) Organizers: Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Telligent Systems - (Marc.Smith@telligent.com) Derek Hansen, Assistant Professor, iSchool, University of Maryland - (dlhansen@umd.edu) NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet. Adding the directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties. In this tutorial the steps needed to install and operate NodeXL for Office 2007 are reviewed. The NodeXL add-in provides directed graph charting features within Excel, allowing users to create node-link diagrams with control over each node and edge color, size, transparency and shape. Since NodeXL builds within Excel, all of the controls and programmatic features of Office are available. Additional features of NodeXL generate social networks from social media data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system. Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. This session will provide a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL. Attendees are encouraged to bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets will be provided. To download the NodeXL Add-in and slides, go to: http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL. Derek Hansen Assistant Professor, Maryland's iSchool Director, CASCI (http://casci.umd.edu)