Import and Analyze your Facebook Network in Gephi

You can analyze your social network from Facebook in Gephi. The Facebook application netvizz can be used for extraction of your social network from Facebook in the format that can be imported in Gephi.  A brief YouTube tutorial by Data J Lab at Tilburg University describes how to grab your network from Facebook, import into Gephi and analyze it there. Once you have downloaded your network and imported it into Gephi, perform the following activities:

• Compute the density and centrality measures of your network;
• Identify the brokers and central nodes in your network;
• Visualize the network to identify the brokers in the network;
• Perform the modularity analysis and identify the communities.
• Prepare a report (300-500 words with two-three figures) outlining the main results of your analysis
  • Describe and interpret the results of all the analysis and address questions such as: How dense is your network? Are there some main network brokers? What are the differences between network participants in the level of their activity? How many disconnected nodes did you find in your network? How many communities (modules) did you find? Reflect on the possible reasons for the different communities in your network (please, avoid sharing any private information)?
  • Reflect on the main issues you faced while working on the analysis, ways how to solved them, and what different you would need to do next time to avoid them;
  • Make sure that the nodes are not identified in the visualizations included in the report and potential data that you may share with your report
• Share your report as a blog post (preferred as it allows for the broader reach). Once you have created your blog post, please, share the blog reference (URL) on Twitter with the #dalmooc hashtag and Pro Solo.
  • Once you have posted and shared your blog on social media, please, read and engage into conversation of the blogs posted by at least two our participants of the course. The conversation can be done as direct comments on the blogs and/or via other social media used in the course.
  • When connecting with other peers, try to compare the findings presented in their reports, connect their findings with the readings you found in the course and/or elsewhere in the web. Ideally, it would be great if you could also reflect on the applicability of each other’s results in the real-world studies/contexts.

Note: In case you do not have a blog and would not like to set up a blog, please, initiate a discussion thread on the edX forum, and share the post reference (URL) on Twitter and Pro Solo as describe above.