Description
The "Conversation Map" system by Warren Sack, a software designer, digital artist, and media theorist now at UC Santa Cruz. The system parses and analyzes online conversations (like Usenet newsgroup messages) to visualize different aspects of discourse: Social Networks (participants as nodes with lines between those who interact), Semantic Networks (connecting terms used similarly within messages), and Themes (main topics identified in conversation). Published as a research paper in 2000, the system was designed for "very large-scale conversations" involving thousands of participants — a scale at which simply reading every message becomes impossible. Sack's work explores the design of online public spaces and computational discourse analysis through graphical interfaces.
