Catalyzing social media scholarship with open tools and data

Abstract

Social media comprises a vast and consequential landscape that has been poorly mapped and understood. Hundreds of millions of people have eagerly moved many of the conversations and discussions that compose civil society into these services and platforms. There is a need to document and analyze these social spaces for many academic and commercial purposes. The Social Media Research Foundation has engaged a strategy to cultivate better research into the structure and dynamics of social media. The foundation is dedicated to the creation of open tools, open data, and open scholarship related to social media. It has implemented a free and open network collection, analysis, and visualization tool called NodeXL to facilitate social media network research. Using NodeXL a group of researchers has collectively authored a publicly available archive, called the NodeXL Graph Gallery, composed of network data sets and visualizations from users around the world. This site has enabled the aggregation of tens of thousands of network datasets and images. Use of the archive has led to scholarly research results that are based on the wide range and scope of social media data sets available.