Social Media Research Foundation Information

We are a group of researchers who want to create open tools, generate and host open data, and support open scholarship related to social media. Social media is the term for all the ways people connect to people through computation. Mobile devices, social networks, micro-blogging and location sharing are just a few of the ways people engage in computer-mediated collective action. Mapping, measuring and understanding the landscape of social media is our mission. We support tool projects that enable the collection, analysis and visualization of social media data. We host data sets that are relevant to social media research. And we will support graduate students studying and building research related to social media. Today, our primary project is NodeXL, the free and open network overview discovery and exploration add-in for Excel 2007 (and 2010) that extends the familiar spreadsheet so that it can collect, analyze and visualize complex social networks. We plan to take on additional projects that improve the variety and quality of data available to the NodeXL social network analysis platform (among others that consume the open GraphML format).