Content-Centered Discussion Mapping

Ka-Ping Yee
Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley

Marti Hearst
School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley

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     Last modified: May 11, 2005

Abstract
We present a simple layout and visualization technique whose goal is to make the content of extended discussions more easily viewable. Unlike conversation visualizations that represent the relationships among discussion elements in a graph, we advocate emphasizing the content. The backend system processes plain text e-mail from mailing lists and extracts discussion structure based on existing formatting conventions. We iterated over several different versions of the design of the content-oriented visualization and evaluated it with a survey sent to mailing list users. Their responses were both strongly positive and strongly negative; based on these responses, we suggest a variation which may be more generally positively received in future evaluations.