This is the first implementation of Loom. It dislays a representation of the newsgroup soc.culture.greek in terms of tone. A block diagram of the system is shown below.

First, news postings from an NNTP server are collected. These are then filtered through a general classifyer. The designated clusters are then displayed visually in a window. A block diagram of the system is shown below.

The classification was one of the more interesting parts of this project. The four chosen clusters were angry, peacefull, news, and other. They are displayed in red, green, yellow, and blue, respectively. The mapping of the colors to the tone is not ideal. Gradations of the color would also be useful if the classification can be done in a finer grain.

The interface displays the individual postings as colored containers over a grid which represents a calendar.

When individual containers are clicked, the message they contain pops up in a window and remains there until the mouse exits the window. Examples of this are shown below.

Further Work

There are many areas for further exploration in this interface. The mains areas are:

Classification: choose a list with more of a variety of tones. In this particular case, it would have been more usefull to further break down the categories of anger since there were so many and they were varied.

Display: The 'packing problem' turned out to be quite difficult and did not easily allow for an intuitive display of individual threads. It would be useful to look at alternate graphing approaches.

Navigation: I would like to have different resolutions of the display. The overview might look like the picture at the top of this web page - with the use of various filters. One can then access the individual postings as they zoom into the canvas.