Marc Smith

Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Marc leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Marc co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation , a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Marc is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity, interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world from Morgan-Kaufmann, which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.

Marc’s research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. For related papers, see more. Marc’s goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. While at Microsoft Research, he founded the Community Technologies Group and led the development of the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine. He contributes to the NodeXL project that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. NodeXL enables social network a nalysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, WWW, Facebook and other network data sets.

The Connected Action consulting group applies social science methods in general and social network analysis (SNA) techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage.

Marc received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an adjunct lecturer at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Marc is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.

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