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You are Invited: Dalhousie Social Media Lab Grand Open House (Friday, March 22,’13) #Dalhousie

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Come and join the Dalhousie’s Social Media Lab team at the School of Information Management on Friday, March 22 at our Grand Open House! Register for one of the 30- minutes time slots and drop in at your preferred time between 10 am – 4 pm. The lab is located on the 2nd Floor, Suite 2010, Room 2021 in the Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building at 6100 University Avenue, Halifax, NS.

We welcome visitors who are curious about what we do and fellow researchers who might be interested in exploring ways to use social media data and social network analysis in their own research.

At the open house visitors will have an opportunity to find out more about the types of research that we do and try out some of the social media analytic software tools that we are currently developing in the lab including Netlytic, AcademiaMap and rDMap. Visitors will also have a chance check out our new research equipment including the new giant “Magic Wall”, a 96? multi-touch video wall, perfectly designed for analyzing and visualizing “big data” from social media.

http://socialmedialab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SML_room_2013-150x150.jpgThis brand new research space at Dalhousie University is the first of its kind in Canada and one of the first social media research labs located at a major university in North America.The lab is made possible with the support of the Dalhousie Faculty of Management and a Leaders Opportunity Fund (LOF) Grant awarded to Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, the Director of the Social media Lab, by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust (NSRIT)

Symposium Recap: Researchers Gather at Dalhousie to Discuss Measuring Influence on Social Media

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The Social Media Lab at Dalhousie University led by GRAND-NCE Researcher Anatoliy Gruzd recently organized the 1st ever international Symposium & Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media (#Influence12) at Dalhousie University on September 28-29, 2012.

This event brought together experts in social media and online social networks from both the academic and business worlds to share ideas on the best practices on how to study the impact of social media on our society, and specifically how to measure influence on social media. The event featured a keynote talk by Gilad Lotan, VP of Research & Development at Socialflow.com. The event attracted a capacity crowd of about 100 attendees from 10 different countries and 40+ different universities and organizations including universities such as University of Oxford (UK), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), Ruppin Academic Center (Israel), Charles Sturt University (Australia), National Research University (Russia), University of Toronto (Canada), Stanford University (USA), Syracuse University (USA), and San Diego State University (USA). Some of the companies and non-academic organizations that were represented at this event included Socialflow, MITRE, PurpleForge, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, CommandN.tv, CGI, DeepMile Networks, Equal6.

For a recap of the event, here are some event-related links:

1) CTV’s Special Report about the event:
http://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=772374&playlistId=1.837527&binId=1.820656

2) The Storify of tweets from the event and photos taken during the events:
http://socialmedialab.ca/?p=7208

3) The Online Program with links to the full-text position papers:
http://socialmedialab.ca/?page_id=6573

* This event was made possible in part by grants from MITACS, GRAND, SSHRC and others funders.

Election 2.0: Tweet, Tweet: What Haligonians Are Saying About the 2012 HFX Election

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2012 Election2.0 Coverage Team

On Saturday, October 20, 2012, the Social Media Lab’s (SML) ‘Election 2.0 Coverage Team’ including MLIS students Madeline Driscoll, Ryan Dyck and Catherine McGoveran along with Anatoliy Gruzd (SML Director) and Philip Mai (SML Research Manager), gathered in the Rowe Building to find out what was on the mind of Haligonians during the 2012 HRM Municipal Election.

The team’s analysis of the Twitterverse resulted in two data-rich blog posts on the Lab’s website and was reported live on CBC radio by Don Connolly as part of the CBC Atlantic election coverage.

For more information, visit the links below:

* This project is part of the Social Media Lab’s initiative to provide independent social media coverage and analysis of important public events. If you are interested in social media research and you would like to participate in this or other projects at the lab, please visit www.socialmedialab.ca for more information.

Anatoliy Gruzd Quoted in an Article on Nature.com

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big dataAnatoliy Gruzd, Director of the Social Media Lab at SIM, was interviewed for an article currently featured on Nature.com entitled  “Facebook ‘likes’ the scientific method”   .

The article included commentaries from Dr. Gruzd and other experts about Facebook’s proposed plan to grant limited access to its users’ data to outside researchers.  This story is part of the open data/big data debate that is currently raging among social scientists.

Also, on a related note, here is a companion blog post about this issue on the Social Media Lab’s website.

Social Media Lab Announces New Research Grants: Tracking Digital Politics across Web 2.0 & Tracking Scholarly Collaborations

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Social Media Lab Logo 2012 “Social Media Campaigns: Tracking Digital Politics across Web 2.0”

The Social Media Lab is pleased to announce a new research initiative with the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University. Dr. Gruzd will be working in collaboration with Dr. Greg Elmer (Ryerson University) as PI and Ganaele Langlois (UOIT) as co-PI on a new five year $363,000 SSHRC funded initiatives: “Social Media Campaigns: Tracking Digital Politics across Web 2.0“. The project is designed to develop new theories, methods, and tools for the analysis of communication on and across social media.

The project team will also include some of the world’s most accomplished scholars of new media and social media: Philip Howard (U. of Washington), Jean Burgess (Queensland U. of Technology), Axel Bruns (Queensland U. of Technology), Mary Francoli (Carleton University), Dan Pare (U. of Ottawa), and Joanna Redden (Infoscape-Ryerson University). Stay tuned for more information.

25K Research Grant from GRAND to Study Scholarly Collaborations

The Social Media Lab is also pleased to announce that it received $25,000 in research funding for 2012-13 from GRAND. GRAND (a Network of Centres of Excellence – NCE) is a multidisciplinary research network exploring the application and advancement of graphics, animation and new media in Canada. This funding will be used to hire and train a few graduate students to work on three different research projects within GRAND: NAVEL, MEOW, DINS. These projects examine different aspect of scholarly collaborations and share a common goal of improving and enhancing the connections between researchers from across Canada.

Social Media Lab Students Presenting at APLA Annual Conference

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MLIS and Computer Science students Melissa Anez, Jennifer Grek Martin, and Sreejata Chatterjee from SIM’s Social Media Lab will be presenting on a panel at this year’s Atlantic Provinces Library Association Annual Conference (APLA 2012) in Wolfville, NS. APLA is one of the oldest library organizations in North America. APLA mission is to promote the interests of libraries, librarians, library technicians and information professionals in the Atlantic Provinces.

The students will be joined by Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Director of the Social Media Lab. The panel will highlight some of the current and past research initiatives at the Social Media Lab.

Sreejata Chatterjee (M.Sc. in CS Candidate, 2013) will be presenting on:

BIG Data, Social Data: Targeted Harnessing of Transient Micro-Blogging Data (Poster)

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Melissa Anez (MLIS Candidate, 2012) will be presenting on:

Social Media Lab Awarded Grant to Organize a Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media

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Conference lecture

The Social Media Lab has recently been awarded a grant by MITACS to organize and host a two-day Symposium & Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media in Halifax. The funds will be used to organize the workshop and offset some of the travel cost for Canadian graduate students selected to attend the workshop.

The symposium will be held at the School of Information Management, Dalhousie University in the Fall of 2012. The workshop will provide internet and social media researchers an opportunity to present and debate their ideas on how to measure social influence, and provide graduate students with the opportunity to build academic and professional contacts, present their research, and learn about latest research in this area from a multidisciplinary perspective. The official call for proposals will be available later this month on the lab’s web site, so stay turned.

Stories You Might Have Missed: SIM’s Social Media Lab Research Featured in the Scholarly Kitchen & Foreign Affairs

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NewsThe paper, “Investigating biomedical research literature in the blogosphere: a case study of diabetes and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c)” which first appeared in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, was featured in the Scholarly Kitchen in an article entitled “Birds of a Feather Blog Together” on 03/07/2012. In this study, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd and Dr. Fiona Black, along with their now former students Thi Ngoc Yen Le and Kathleen Amos used a variety of methods such as web mining, social network analysis and content analysis to examine whether bloggers use peer reviewed medical literature in their blog posts and why.

Another paper, “Geography of Twitter Networks” which was originally published in the January 2012 issue of Social Networks, was recently featured in Foreign Affairs on 04/04/2012 in an article entitled, “How Twitter Makes the Internet More Local.” This study explored how connections on Twitter are influenced and bounded by geography. This study has also been featured on NPR, Slate.com and other media outlets.

Twitter’s 6th birthday & Visualizing the split on Toronto City Council

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For your reading pleasure:

The Toronto Star ran a nice story today on Twitter’s 6th birthday featuring commentaries from Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Director of the Social Media Lab at SIM.

And yesterday, Global News ran a story “Visualizing the split on Toronto City Council” about a longitudinal study using social network analysis (SNA) to track changing voting blocks and shifts in the voting patterns of Toronto City Council members since the election of Mayor Rob Ford. Global News relied on  Dr. Gruzd’s expertise in SNA to verify their study’s methodology and confirm their analysis.