Social network analysis for Elgg

im looking for a solution to better understand what is going on inside my Elgg community website. A solution is to do social network analysis. This analysis will collect data about relations and interactions between people and the things they work on. The analysis will then give more insight and provide hints to improve by stimulating the right people and providing better tools. This will allow us to help the community grow.

A new plugin SNA4Elgg enables us to collect this data. But much more needs to be done. the plugin needs to be improved to collect more types of relevant data. Research has to be done to find out what is relevant data. Then the data needs to be processed according to graph theory, analysed (Gephi). The results then can be used to improve the system. It can also be used to provide feedback to the users to show who is the most interesting, active or most influential person.

conclusion: this approach will help to improve your community

To make this work we need to work together and share our ideas.

  • Check out my github. I have just finished my analytics plugin that integrates with segment.io. perhaps that will be of interest to you

  • Could you send a link to the github code please ?

  • The hype analytics plugin forwards events to an external service "segment.io".

    1. Plugin supports new events (cannot analyse historical events)
    2. Requirers a segment.io account (costs money)
    3. Requirers additional analysis

    So the plugin can be usefull for some who has the money to pay for the service and who does not want to look at historical events. The code is very interesting and helpfull for improvement of the SNA4Elgg plugin

  • @Tauvic, that's an accurate round up.

  • Not sure about your requirements or familiar with SNA4Elgg. But if you are looking for tracking user interaction with your website like clicking of links, browsing products etc then why cant you take a look at the Google Analytics Events?

    We have used it on a wordpress site to detect the heatmap on the site (to find out which blocks of the site are most commonly browsed by the visitors)

    - Mahin Akbar

  • Social network analysis is a little different from tracking webpage clicks and social events as google analytics defines them. Its more on social graphs and interacting between people. So the sna4elgg and hypeanalytics are both for analytics but not the same kind of analytics. For a definition Take a look at http://train.ed.psu.edu/WFED-543/SocNet_TheoryApp.pdf

  • How do you plan to add/calculate features like centrality (different types such as eigenvector, betweeness, etc)? 

    Maybe one of the features of this SNA plugin could be a ranking page, with ranking according to different parameters ( centrality, diffusion etc)?

    I am currently working on a college project which should hopefully have the same feature. If I get it up and running, I'll be sure to post back here.

  • I cannot calculate features by myself because i just found out what the word social anlysis really means. I just use the tools like the SNA4Elgg plugin and Gephi. Im now experimenting to see if this technology will provide me with valuable insights and i hope it is not too complicated. I have added some extra php code to the original SNA4Elgg plugin to get information on the interactions between users (Elgg object and annotations). Now i have to reduce and summarize this data into interaction links with weights and time stamps or time periods. That is what i found out by scanning the internet. So if anybody is an expert on social network analysis im happy to work together.

    Im looking for patterns such as users creating content (blog, discussion topic) and other users commenting on this content. This kind of interaction i want to find and report on (for now). And when a solution has been found then this information could be fed back into Elgg as a kind of report or a list of most active / interesting people / group and so on. There even is a steaming graph data interface available for Gephi, but i think that is a far future goal. I take it step by step.

  • I was hoping to use SNA4Elgg to visualize relationships among members, groups, and content similar to how Thinkbase was able to do this for Freebase.com data: http://readwrite.com/2008/06/05/thinkbase_mapping_the_worlds_brain. I think that ThinkMap could be a good approach to visualizing Elgg social networks for those who do not need the option for customized statistics. http://www.thinkmap.com/

    Unfortunately, I hit some of the same hurdles as @Tauvic with SNA4Elgg and Gephi and ran out of time and patience to continue pursuing this plugin.