Visualising Conversations
I have been lately working on adapting WET for the representation of asynchronous conversations or, in other words, threads existing within forums. Very often, forum’s discussions hold hundreds or even thousand of comments in the same thread. This threads are usually a hierarchy which starts with the very first post. Then, every replying comment contribute to the generation of an intricate and hierarchical structure that is usually difficult to be followed and understood.
This research aims at discovering how the “map of the conversation” can help users to focus on the comment they want to read, and to generate a whole understanding of the global structure of a conversation.
By now, the tool enables the visualisation and exploration of Slashdot.org threads. This is due to the collaboration of Andreas Kalternbrunner, who kindly contributed to the project with ideas and datasets crawled from this popular online network.
We have published an online demo of “Slashdot WET” here, within the web of the Content Analysis Workshop of the WWW’09 Conference.
