Plot-polling: Collaborative Knowledge Visualization for Online Discussions

  • Authors:
  • Alex Ivanov;Thomas Erickson;Dianne Cyr

  • Affiliations:
  • Simon Fraser University,;Simon Fraser University;Simon Fraser University

  • Venue:
  • IV '06 Proceedings of the conference on Information Visualization
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Online communities are extremely popular; yet most of them still rely primarily on text for knowledge creation and communication. This paper describes a graphical webpoll prototype-a mix of information, knowledge, and social visualization-that has been designed and deployed in an online discussion board on herbal antidepressants. The prototype, hereby named the "plot-poll", allows users to collaboratively construct a sequence of mini histograms that indicate experienced mood change during a ten week period. The pilot study shows that plot-polling is quite effective in engaging low-frequency contributors to participate. More work is required to support these findings, and reveal whether the graphic format is able to provide affective qualities to the user experience.