Social Ch@nge

Do you ever stumble across something, and wonder how you could have missed an entire field of study? Not just an interesting fact, but an entire body of research, whole teams of grad students slaving away…with you none the wiser? Okay, maybe it doesn’t keep you awake at night – it’s just me.

Still – have you heard of “social media visualization?” This a rapidly growing subset of network visualization and modeling – that is, trying to make sense of the mountains of social tracks we’re all leaving on the internet.

There’s a great article in the magazine Seed this month – which, by the way, is another terrific recent find – which discusses how social researchers have never had access to “live” data on how people interact.

Want to see how people are move around a city when a disaster strikes? Plot their Twitters and track their cellphones. Want to see how disease spreads? Look for people typing “flu” into Google, and plot their locations on a map.

A small-scale, but beautiful, example of this can be seen in the software of Christopher Baker. He created a killer app to map every email he’s ever sent – it’s a little obsessive-compulsive, but also fascinating.

And if you’re really serious, check out the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. It’s not all visualization stuff, but pretty amazing ideas. The full papers aren’t posted, just enough to give you a taste.

So, what does this have to do with your nonprofit? Imagine being able to map and track how your donors interact with your organisation, and with eachother, in real time. I’m actually working on a tiny version of this: taking our donation data and placing it on a map, so that we get a sense of what effect locality has on our membership. But what if we took it further – what if, like Christopher Baker, and mapped all the emails between staff, donors and volunteers? We could see where the nodes are, the connectors and hubs who hold our social network together. At the very least, like Nolan, we could create some great art. What do you think? Have you come across any great social media visualization tools?