Welcome to the VOSON Project!

All VOSON user accounts are now located on the Uberlink website. Please visit that site if you would like to apply for a VOSON user account or to get further information about how to access the VOSON System and VOSON+NodeXL.

The Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Project is based at the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, The Australian National University. We aim to advance the Social Science of the Internet through new empirical research into online networks and the development of the following associated e-Research tools:

VOSON System - web-based software for the collection and analysis of online network data; incorporates web mining, data visualisation, and social network analysis (SNA).
VOSON Data Provider for NodeXL - a plugin for NodeXL (Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel), which is a template for Excel 2007. VOSON+NodeXL allows VOSON account holders users to access VOSON System functionality (data collection and processing) from within NodeXL. Alpha version released February 2010.

Breaking news

May 2012 - Robert Ackland and Mathieu O'Neil have been awarded the 2012 Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA) Paper Award for their article "Online collective identity: The case of the environmental movement", which was published in Social Networks in 2011. The CITASA Paper Award recognises an outstanding published paper or book chapter related to the sociology of communications or the sociology of information technology.
October 2011 - Robert Ackland has been appointed a founding member of the Science Council of the Web Foundation's Web Index project. The Web Index will assess the political, economic and social impact of the Web, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries.
October 2011 - Robert Ackland gave the following presentations:
- "Revealed Preference in Networks" (joint with Lingfei Wu) - poster presentation at 2011 Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN), New York University Stern School of Business, September 30th - October 1st, 2011.
- "Horses for Courses? A Comparative Study of Web Crawlers for the Social Sciences" (joint with Francisca Borquez) - seminar presentations at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland (4th October) and the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group, Northwestern University (7th October).
April 2011 - Hai Liang and Lingfei Wu, visiting PhD students from the Web Mining Lab at the City University of Hong Kong, reported on their progress at an ADSRI seminar. Hai and Lingfei are working with Dr Robert Ackland on different topics in the field of online social networks. More details.
March 2011 - Robert Ackland gave a presentation at the HC Coombs Policy Forum on Social Media, Privacy and Security titled Web 2.0: Context, Uptake and Implications. More details.
March 2011 - Robert Ackland attended the Third International Workshop on Network Theory: Web Science Meets Network Science. More details.
December 2010 – Robert Ackland and Jiaying Zhao from the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute gave presentations on online social networks and hyperlink analysis using VOSON at the 2010 ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference. More details.
October 2010 - Dr Paul Henman (University of Queensland), Dr Robert Ackland and Professor Helen Margetts (Oxford University) have received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant of $300,000 over three years for their project "The institutional structure of e-government: a cross-policy, cross-country comparison". More details.
September 2010 - A record number of students are enrolled in the two ANU masters courses that are related to the VOSON Project (and taught by Dr Robert Ackland). DEMO8086 Social Science of the Internet has 12 students and DEMO8087 Online Research Methods has 20 students: this is over twice the enrolments in 2009! More details.
June 2010 - The VOSON Data Provider for NodeXL was successfully used by around 60 students in a laboratory assignment for the Northwestern University undergraduate course IEMS 341 - Social Network Analysis. More details.
February 2010 - Alpha version of VOSON Data Provider for NodeXL released. More details.
January 2010 - ACSPRI Summer Program 'Online Research Methods' short course successfully run. More details.