Archiving Social Networks

Marc Smith, Sociologist from the Social Media Research Foundation, spoke at this year’s Personal Digital Archiving conference about software they have developed to archive social networks in social media. Node XL is open source, and as such enables anyone to study and archive the social networks that exist in sites like Facebook and Twitter. The software generates graphs that illustrate the relationships between people surrounding the common comments they make. It’s difficult for me to describe, but it is pretty cool, especially if you are interested in sociological research using social media.

http://www.archive.org/details/PDA2011-marcsmith

For whoever is doing personal archiving for their final project: Download presentation, papers, etc. at the site for the First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information:

http://senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/downloads.html