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Flash forums and forumReader: navigating a new kind of large-scale online discussion

Published: 06 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

We describe a popular kind of large, topic-centered, transient discussion, which we term a <i>flash forum</i>. These occur in settings ranging from web-based bulletin boards to corporate intranets, and they display a conversational style distinct from Usenet and other online discussion. Notably, authorship is more diffuse, and threads are less deep and distinct. To help orient users and guide them to areas of interest within flash forums, we designed ForumReader, a tool combining data visualization with automatic topic extraction. We describe lessons learned from deployment to thousands of users in a real world setting. We also report a laboratory experiment to investigate how interface components affect behavior, comprehension, and information retrieval. The ForumReader interface is well-liked by users, and our results suggest it can lead to new navigation patterns. We also find that, while both visualization and text analytics are helpful individually, combining them may be counterproductive.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2004
644 pages
ISBN:1581138105
DOI:10.1145/1031607
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 November 2004

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration
  2. large-scale conversations
  3. mass interaction
  4. persistent conversations
  5. prototype
  6. thumbnail interface
  7. user interface
  8. user study
  9. visualization

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CSCW04
CSCW04: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 6 - 10, 2004
Illinois, Chicago, USA

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CSCW '04 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 176 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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  • (2023)CoArgue : Fostering Lurkers’ Contribution to Collective Arguments in Community-based QA PlatformsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580932(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Graph-Based Conversation Analysis in Social MediaBig Data and Cognitive Computing10.3390/bdcc60401136:4(113)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Revisiting Piggyback Prototyping: Examining Benefits and Tradeoffs in Extending Existing Social Computing SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555576:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)PlanHelperProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555556:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Design and Application of Automatic Feedback Scaffolding in Forums to Promote LearningIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2022.315691415:2(150-166)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2020)ConVisQA: A Natural Language Interface for Visually Exploring Online Conversations2020 24th International Conference Information Visualisation (IV)10.1109/IV51561.2020.00077(440-447)Online publication date: Sep-2020
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  • (2019)Visual Exploration of Topic Controversy in Online ConversationsHCI International 2019 – Late Breaking Posters10.1007/978-3-030-30712-7_46(369-373)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2019
  • (2018)How Features of a Civic Design Competition Influences the Collective Understanding of a ProblemProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32743892:CSCW(1-25)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
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