MS Excel SNA?

Every year, Microsoft holds a Research Faculty Summit, to highlight the work being done in MS Research. This year, Marc Smith presented an add-in for MS Excel (2007*) that allows users to generate and manipulate social networks within more familiar environs.

I've always wondered why Excel lacked the capacity to display networks - seems like a no-brainer for Microsoft. Granted, SNA is far more complicated than it might appear at first blush, but with the growing availability of such data, I suspect more and more social scientists will learn how to use these tools.

Adding SNA capability to the most common desktop software in the world should speed things up a bit.

*Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work with earlier versions of MS Excel (another "feature" of Office 2007).

Periodic Table of Videos

OK, so this is not social science, but one can easily imagine social science (and digital humanities) counterparts to this creative pedagogical device put together by a team of chemists and IT-specialists at the University of Nottingham. Their Periodic Table of Videos is a twist on the periodic table of chemical elements. It allows the user to click on any element in the table to view a short video describing the major properties of, and other notable facts about, the element. While not exactly a novel concept, what makes the table attractive is the high quality of the videos, which were produced by a "video journalist [Brady Haran] .. passionate about science communication." I think this serves as yet another example of the research and pedagogical value of forging collaborative partnerships between substantive experts and those well versed in the art and science of information technology.

While I'm thinking of it, one interesting pedagogical application for one of my areas of substantive interest would be a "Video-Annotated American Constitution," where the user can click on specific provisions of the Constitution to see videos and/or podcasts pertaining to it. This would be a multimedia enhancement to (more and more common) text-annotated versions, such as those created by Cornell University Law School, FindLaw, and Justia. Even better would be a fully Web 2.0 equipped version that allows users to upload content and offer their own comments and annotations.