Analyzing the Social Web

by Jennifer Golbeck

Analyzing the Social Web provides a framework for the analysis of public data currently available and being generated by social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Access and analysis of this public data about people and their connections to one another allows for new applications of traditional social network analysis techniques that let us identify things like who are the most important or influential people in a network, how things will spread through the network, and the nature of peoples' relationships. Analyzing the Social Web introduces you to these techniques, shows you their application to many different types of social media, and discusses how social media can be used as a tool for interacting with the online public. Presents interactive social applications on the web, and the types of analysis that are currently conducted in the study of social media Covers the basics of network structures for beginners, including measuring methods for describing nodes, edges, and parts of the network Discusses the major categories of social media applications or phenomena and shows how the techniques presented can be applied to analyze and understand the underlying data Provides an introduction to information visualization, particularly network visualization techniques, and methods for using them to identify interesting features in a network, generate hypotheses for analysis, and recognize patterns of behavior Includes a supporting website with lecture slides, exercises, and downloadable social network data sets that can be used can be used to apply the techniques presented in the book

Genres: Psychology, Research

486 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Vika Gardner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Textbook for undergrads, I think, complete with exercises, some of which are rather more involved than the description might present. Presents material at a very basic level, describing different sorts of social media and how humans ("networks") are using and may be understood computationally through the social media.

Readable, but as a Mac user, I did not find much that was actually do-able. The description of network analysis software -- a major reason I picked this book up -- is apparently dated. Nothing described here would work with my OS 10.10 system, no matter how I fussed with Java. I don't know if I'm going to have to install some Windows OS just to make things work or not. On that level it's truly disappointing.

[Eric Carzon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a text book, but a great introduction to how to analyze social media usage using network analysis techniques.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

provides good foundational knowledge on network structures and the underlying mathematics of centralities

[Robert Bogue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you get an idea that you want to explore and you propose a presentation topic on it – and it gets accepted. Well, maybe that doesn’t happen to you but I do it occasionally. It allows me to test what folks are interested in. In this case, I had submitted a session called “Delving into SharePoint Search in the Cloud”. It was designed to cover how the way that we find information is shifting from search to social. It was designed to show how push vs. pull can work.

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