NodeXL Academy: Social Media Network Analysis Short Course

Join us on Tuesday and Wednesday, December 8 to 9, 2026, 3:00 to 6:00 PM GMT each afternoon, for a NodeXL Academy short course in social media network analysis across two 3-hour live afternoon sessions. This is the last NodeXL Academy short course of 2026. Next course is in 2027.

Across two hands-on afternoons, you finish able to collect social media data, find the accounts that drive a conversation, detect its communities, analyze its content, and publish a map that makes the structure clear. Everything runs inside Microsoft Excel, and no programming is required.

What you will learn across the two afternoons:

• Collect real data from sources such as X, Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
• Calculate the network metrics that identify influential accounts: degree, betweenness, closeness, and PageRank.
• Detect the communities inside a network using NodeXL's clustering.
• Analyze content with sentiment analysis and the top words, hashtags, and links.
• Lay out and publish a clean, shareable network map, and work through the full workflow on your own data.

New this year: NodeXL Pro's new X (Apify) importer (introduced in v.565) brings X data back within reach, collect by hashtag, keyword, or user timeline with one click, and pay only for what you collect. You will also get a clear picture of how AI is reshaping social media research. If you are returning after a while away, you will leave caught up on what has changed.

Your instructors:

• Dr. Marc Smith, sociologist and director of the Social Media Research Foundation.
• Dr. Verónica Espinoza, data scientist, neurobiologist, chemist, consultant, trainer and speaker, and one of NodeXL's leading educators, in English and Spanish.
• Dr. Wasim Ahmed, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Hull, Research Fellow in Social Network Science and Digital Disinformation at the United Nations University, and Associate Editor of JMIR Infodemiology.

Who should attend: researchers and graduate students, marketers and communications professionals, journalists, and anyone who wants to close the year with a practical, hands-on network analysis skill.

Questions: nodexlacademy@gmail.com