The SUNBELT XXVIII (International Sunbelt Social Network Conference) was held at the Tradewinds Island Resort, St. Pete Beach, Florida from January 22 to 27, 2008. It was the annual conference for the INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis).
SLIS was well-represented at the conference with presentations by SLIS and Informatics faculty member John Paolillo, and by Russell Duhon (Senior Software Developer, InfoVis Lab) on behalf of SLIS faculty member Katy Börner's Network Workbench Project. Bruce Herr (Senior Software Developer) and Weixia Huang (Senior System Archictect) with Bö'rner's Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center were co-contributors along with colleague Ann McCranie on the Network Workbench Project presentation.
"Longitudinal Social Network Relations in an Online Multiplayer Game"
-by John Paolillo (January 24 - pages 71-72, conference program)
Online multiplayer games are a relatively new entertainment form in which players synchronously connect over the Internet to central servers in order to play a game. An increasing number of computer games are played partly or entirely online, meaning that increasing numbers of people engage in a type of sustained social interaction whose nature is not well understood. What is the strength of a social tie that is formed in such a context, and how does it evolve over time? To address this question, I conducted a longitudinal social network analysis of BZFlag, an online multiplayer game in which each player controls the actions of a tank. BZFlag is organized as a free and open source service, and has approximately 11,000 registered users, and is played on more than two hundred servers, worldwide.
"Network Workbench: A Large-Scale Network Analysis, Modeling and Visualization Toolkit for Biomedical, Social Science at Physics Research"
- by Russell Duhon, Ann McCranie, Bruce Herr, Weixia (Bonnie) Huang (January 24 - see page 18, conference program)
Network Workbench (NWB) Tool is a newly developing framework for large-scale network analysis, modeling, and visualization. This data-algorithm-computing resources environment aims to provide an all-in-one tool for researchers, educators, and practitioners interested in the study of biomedical, social and behavioral science, physics, and other networks. It is a powerful algorithm integration framework that can allow network scientists and other researchers to both build their own specific measurement tools and take advantage of those developed by others. The tool has a streamlined menu-driven interface for interactive algorithm selection, data manipulation, user and session management. The NWB tool is free and the most recent release containing over 70 algorithms is available at [http://nwb.slis.indiana.edu].
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Posted January 23, 2008