Maymester

So that's it! Finished my first and last Maymester class! To be honest, it was a little bitter sweet. Of all the classes I've taken for my masters and in my undergrad, this one has been one of my favorites. So it was sad to have it end so quickly... especially since I have another stupid research class to take in July... fun...

The class I just took was Social Network Analysis. Doesn't the name sound daunting and exciting at the same time?! I thought so. And, even the first couple of days in the class, I really had no idea what I was doing. My teacher was talking a mile a minute about all of the fancy calculations and analyzations you could do with this program to find out all sorts of information about social networks and it just went right over my head! Luckily, the more I played with it, the more I understood it. And now I think it's the coolest program in the world- besides Pinterest- I'd die without Pinterest. (Just kidding, but really.)

Here's an example of what kinds of things I've been looking at:

runDisney Twitter-sphere

The above graph is a visual representation of runDisney's Twitter community. Using the program NodeXL, I've been able to see the different groups of people who tweeted about runDisney. The sizes reflect their importance in the network. I also got to analyze their Facebook fan page and their YouTube presence. It was so cool!

I know this post is a little on the nerdy side but it was seriously so interesting! I think it was one of the most useful classes I've taken so far- which might be because the whole social/ digital/ interactive media thing is kinda my scene (do I even have a scene as a student?).