[Air-L] Visualization tool for conversations?

Jennifer Stromer-Galley jstromer at albany.edu
Wed Apr 22 06:56:38 PDT 2009


My co-author Anna Martinson and I re-jiggered a tool developed by Susan
Herring (with help) for analyzing  topic drift in synchronous chat that
might work. See:

Herring, S. C. and Kurtz, A. J. (2006). 'Visualizing Dynamic Topic
Analysis.' Proceedings of CHI'06. ACM Press. Retrieved April 18, 2008
from http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/chi06.pdf.

Herring, S. C. and Nix, C. G. (1997, March) 'Is "Serious Chat" an
Oxymoron? Pedagogical vs. Social Use of Internet Relay Chat.' Paper
presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics, Orlando,
FL.

Anna and I have a manuscript forthcoming in NM&S that includes our
description of how we used the tool and what the mapping of the
discussion looked like. Let me know if you'd like the article, and I'll
email it to you.

I've also spoken briefly with Judith Donath, who currently is at MIT's
Media Lab, whose students have developed several interest visualizing
techniques, including the People Garden (here's a quick link to info:
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/01/people_garden_social_communicat
ion_data_visualization.html). I know she continues to be interested in
data visualization, although maybe not quite what your needs are.

BTW, Tracy suggested Atlas.ti. I've mucked around quite a bit with
Atlas' visualization tool. It's clunky, and in the end abandoned my
efforts to use that to track interactions. I think it's useful if you're
hoping to visualize small segments of interaction. But, my data sets
tend to be relatively large, making the Atlas approach quite labor
intensive.

~Jenny

Assistant Professor
Department of Communication, SS 340
University at Albany, SUNY
Albany, NY 12222
518-442-4873
jstromer at albany.edu
http://www.albany.edu/~jstromer  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org 
> [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of gus andrews
> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 12:16 PM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] Visualization tool for conversations?
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> My dissertation involves conversational analysis of the 
> comment threads on blogs. I want to be able to visualize 
> which commenters are responding to other commenters. Does 
> anyone have suggestions of software to use? Ideally I'd like 
> to find something where I can create visualizations as I 
> code, dragging lines between one comment and another. (I 
> realize the latter request is probably a pipe dream.)
> 

> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks!



More information about the Air-L mailing list