visualizing discussions

designs for public conversations

Readings:

Visualization components for persistent conversations. Marc A. Smith , Andrew T. Fiore
Warren Sack, "Conversation Map: An Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations," Journal of Management Information Systems (Winter 2000-2001).
Developing legible visualizations for online social spaces. boyd, Lee, Ramage and Donath.

Sketch a pair of designs for visualizing newsgroup discussions.
1. An overview - this is the landsape scale - what does the space of many groups look like?
2. The conversation scale - think about the information in the group accumulating over time.

Semantic Mapping

My ideas on a visualisation scheme for very large scale conversations such as Usenet developed from a semantic mapping perspective. I wanted to allow users to explore topics by discussion subject (I will assume for now that this information could be gained from analysis of the text of each post in a thread). Searching for a particular topic, would probably bring up the newsgroups who's official subject was that topic (if one exists), but it would also reveal other groups from whom the search string was a current major topic of conversation. This starts to take account of the tendency of groups to slide off topic at times, by including this possibly valuable text in a search.

I wanted to show accumulated knowledge on a topic, and differentiate it from early stages of discussion. I am assuming a system where the later becomes the former through user rating, automating editing and ranking of information according to links from faq producing or editor members of a newsgroup. Another possibility would be to collect navigation and rating data for each user and offer them the chance to 'publish' their personal 'editor map', for others to find associated with their user name and follow to all the recent posts they found useful/interesting. I will outline how I expect users to provide further feedback below.

Topic Columns

I felt a thread had to remain intact (and couldn't be divided in subcategories of topic, while maintaining the coherence of discussion). Therefore the smallest unit on my map of topics, is each thread. I decided to represent each of these as a column. The column height is based on this popularity/editor link metric, and is reduced in proportion to unbalanced negative feedback (thus shrinking unwanted columns out of the landscape

over time). The second feature of the columns is the roundness of their edges. This 'rigidity' is proportional to how many positive or balanced positive and negative (since a controversial, topic is still important to at least half a group) ratings a thread has received. This is then also a measure of how much of a difference your own rating will make, so 'soft' columns are still malleable, and encourage new and old users to participate (hopefully!). Colour would be assigned to each 'island' of topic as an indication of a user search. Multiple searches would then appear in multiple colours.

Topics which are dominated by question and answer forums (such as technical computer help), will have an immediately visible strong fact based history of tall, rigid columns. If they are still active discussion, they will also have much shorter (young and not yet rated) topics surrounding the core information. On the other hand, support and debate topics, will have very little long term history, and so just soft topics. The reduction of height in negatively rated threads will help to remove focus from spam.

Activity Bubbles

A final indicator on this large scale topic map is the addition of small subtle 'bubbles'

fizzing above topics to reflect recent activity (I think this effect could be produced with circle that rise and expand quickly). I envisage a sliding scale to adjust the time period sampled from 'hours' through to 'years'. I think a bubbling metaphor provides an easily readable and internationally identifiable indication of activity.

Thread Visualisation

My second line of thought is on the reading and provision of feedback for individual posts. I wanted to design a system that encouraged the large lurker/information

gathering usenet population to participate in information collection, community building and editing/rating roles by making participation seem less intimidating. I decided on a system somewhere between a wiki and a newsgroup, where comments and metalogs (discussions on the style, appropriateness, etc of the post) could be added to a text, and would remain attached to the particular line they referred to. In this rough sketch of the page layout I imagine, you can see the single line marker extending out into a page of comments. I used the convention of placing added comments to the right of a text. When a page is read, the text it refers to (if any), is compacted to the left, and the layers of comments are compacted to the right. I have used a 3D raised comment to signify a metalog (allowing for further raised levels of discussion about discussion!). Where a second post follows on from the first in the traditional newsgroup manner, I have used a small join (in the middle picture above) I imagine that in the compacted mode, the text would be mostly obscured, with just an indication of the presence of comments. A further feature would be to fit two texts side by side, allowing text and comments to be read at the same time.

In reading a discussion, a user would be encourage to add notes where ever they felt the need. These notes would then be labelled (possibly with colour) according to criteria such as 'interest' or 'appropriateness'. Future readers would hopefully add assessments to everything as they read. The only way i can see this being of low enough cost in terms of time and effort, is with a pen entry system, which would allow users to 'jot' on the text, marking it with simple positive and negative marks such as ticks, crosses, circling or underling, crossing out, arrows,

etc.. i also wondered if a colour wheel type feed back entry system would work. Finally, I wanted to collect some feedback indication of social and support newsgroups, where the above criteria tend not to apply. For this I thought a 'thanks' button, which could be clicked when someone who was replied to felt the reply was good, would give an indication of social connection from a users perspective. I haven't decided on a good visualisation to indicate this connectedness and supportiveness reflect in a newsgroup or topic that says 'thanks' a lot.

Plenty More to Add

Some further features which I think would be interesting to explore:

Mousing over the border of a topic region would float a window showing calls posted to start new threads of discussion. Over established topics, a window showing each topic column by thread name, clicking one, would highlight it).

To address the issue of the lack of private conversation in current newsgroups (other than dyadic email exchanges), I would like users to be able to post calls for private, limited number discussions (that could then be edited and 'published' at the participants' discretion).

Calls for cross topic debates could be posted by searching for the two topics in the topic map, and posting in the space between the two regions of activity (the call would then be seen by both groups).

Of course, anything people can do through computers, a bot can probably mimic, so junk mail would eventually evolve to overcome all the features designed to reduce spam.

Clicking on a topic column should bring up a large scale overview of all the posts in the thread, and the position of all the comments. The text would be highlighted with the average user rating at each point. It could be possible to offer a summary based on highly popular passages of text only. The question is would it still make sense?

Hopefully the energy which is currently put into updating and posting faqs and mediation would be channelled into writing welcome guides for newcomers and 'editor maps', which would act as guides through old, useful posts.