Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Sacramento Kings, a move that was perceived by many as a plan to bail
on the current year, finish low in the standings, and maximize the chances
of signing prospect Andrew Wiggins. Wiggins was a marketer's dream, an
exceptionally talented 18-year-old widely projected to be the first overall
pick in the 2014 draft (a future he would soon fulfill) and a potential
franchise NBA player. Wiggins was also a hometown boy, born and raised in
Toronto.
A funny thing happened, though, when the Raptors traded Rudy Gay. They
started winning. Through a combination of athleticism and renewed
commitment to work ethic and team basketball, by the end of January 2014,
Toronto had climbed from the bottom of the standings to third place in the
Eastern Conference, winning twice as many games as they lost along the
way. There was something else that they found along the way: their identity.
The fan community was buzzing with excitement. Team management may
well have been motivated to find out what that buzz looked like. Who was
talking about the team, and what were they saying? What personnel and
marketing moves generated the most excitement? The NBA has more than
200 million followers on Facebook and Twitter across all of its league, team,
and player pages. As the following examples show, graph visualization can
be used to give visual form to social media data, providing opportunity for
exactly this kind of analysis.
Social Media Using NodeXL and Gephi
The NodeXL plug-in extends Microsoft Excel with capabilities for ingesting
and preparing graph data for display. Using the Social Network Importer
extension for NodeXL, you can extract data easily from Twitter and
Facebook for further processing and export it in common graph format for
importing into graph visualization tools like Gephi.
Note
If you haven't yet installed the NodeXL and Social Network Importer,
you can download them from http://nodexl.codeplex.com and
http://socialnetimporter.codeplex.com . Version 1.0.1.251 of NodeXL
and version 1.9.2 of Social Network Importer were used for this
exercise.
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