We are interested in designing systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computer networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another. We call such systems “socially translucent systems ” and suggest that they have three characteristics—visibility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their social experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another. To motivate and focus our ideas we develop a vision of knowledge communities, conversationally based systems that support the creation, management and reuse of knowledge in a social context. We describe our experience in designing and deploying one layer of functionality for knowledge communities, embodied in a working system called “Babble, ” and discuss research issues raised by a socially translucent approach to design. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems—Human factors; Human information processing; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and

Although current online chat environments provide new opportunities for communication, they are quite constrained in their ability to convey many important pieces of social information, ranging from the number of participants in a conversation to the subtle nuances of expression that enrich face to face speech. In this paper we present Chat Circles, an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversation. Here, presence and activity are made manifest by changes in color and form, proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups into conversational clusters, and the archives of a conversation are made visible through an integrated history interface. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions. Keywords chatroom, conversation, social visualization, turn-taking, graphical history, Internet, World Wide Web

Chat programs and instant messaging services are increasingly popular among Internet users. However, basic issues with the interfaces and data structures of most forms of chat limit their utility for use in formal interactions (like group meetings) and decision-making tasks. In this paper, we discuss Threaded Text Chat, a program designed to address some of the deficiencies of current chat programs. Standard forms of chat introduce ambiguity into interaction in a number of ways, most profoundly by rupturing connections between turns and replies. Threaded Chat presents a solution to this problem by supporting the basic turn-taking structure of human conversation. While the solution introduces interface design challenges of its own, usability studies show that users ’ patterns of interaction in Threaded Chat are equally effective, but different (and possibly more efficient) than standard chat programs.

It has been proposed that email clients could be improved if they presented messages grouped into conversations. An email conversation is the tree of related messages that arises from the use of the reply operation. We propose two models of conversation. The first model characterizes a conversation as a chronological sequence of messages; the second as a tree based on the reply relationship. We show how existing email clients and prior research projects implicitly support each model to a greater or lesser degree depending on their design, but none fully supports both models simultaneously. We present a mixed-model visualization that simultaneously presents sequence and reply relationships among the messages of a conversation, making both visible at a glance. We describe the integration of the visualization into a working prototype email client. A usability study indicates that the system meets our usability goals and verifies that the visualization fully conveys both types of relationships within the messages of an email conversation. Keywords Computer-mediated communication, asynchronous

: Although avatars may resemble communicative interface agents, they have for the most part not profited from recent research into autonomous embodied conversational systems. In particular, even though avatars function within conversational environments (for example, chat or games), and even though they often resemble humans (with a head, hands, and a body) they are incapable of representing the kinds of knowledge that humans have about how to use the body during communication. Humans, however, do make extensive use of the visual channel for interaction management where many subtle and even involuntary cues are read from stance, gaze and gesture. We argue that the modeling and animation of such fundamental behavior is crucial for the credibility and effectiveness of the virtual interaction in chat. By treating the avatar as a communicative agent, we propose a method to automate the animation of important communicative behavior, deriving from work in conversation and discourse theory. B...

Although avatars may resemble animated communicating interface agents, they have for the most part not profited from recent research into autonomous systems. In particular, even though avatars function within conversational environments (for example, chat or games), and even though they often resemble humans (with a head, hands, and a body) they are incapable of representing the kinds of knowledge that humans have about how to use the body during communication. Their appearance does not translate into increased communicative bandwidth. Face-to-face conversation among humans, however, does make extensive use of the visual channel for interaction management where many subtle and even involuntary cues are read from stance, gaze and gesture. We argue that the modeling and animation of such fundamental behavior is crucial for the credibility and effectiveness of the virtual interaction in chat. By treating the avatar as a communicative agent, we propose a method to automate the...

We discuss the design, implementation and evaluation of two related visualizations of authors’ activities in Usenet newsgroups. Current Usenet news browsers focus on messages and thread structures while disregarding valuable information about the authors of messages and the participants of the various discussions. Newsgroup Crowds graphically represents the population of authors in a particular newsgroup. Authors are displayed according to the number of messages they contribute to each thread and the number of different days they appear in the space, illustrating and contrasting the interaction patterns of participants within the newsgroup. AuthorLines visualizes a particular author’s posting activity across all newsgroups over a period of one year. This visualization reveals temporal patterns of thread initiation and reply that can broadly characterize the roles authors play in Usenet. We report the results of a user study that explored the value of these interfaces for developing high-level awareness of the activity and population in these conversational spaces. We suggest that interfaces that convey information about the social histories of populations and individuals may support better selection and evaluation of newsgroup content. 1.

As the basis of value creation increasingly depends on the leverage of the intangible assets of firms, Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) are emerging as powerful sources of competitive advantage. However, the general recognition of the importance of such systems seems to be accompanied by a technology-induced drive to implement systems with inadequate consideration of the fundamental knowledge problems that the KMS are likely to solve. This paper contributes to the stream of research on Knowledge Management Systems by proposing an inductively developed framework for this important class of information systems, classifying KMS based on the locus of the knowledge and the a-priori structuring of contents. This framework provides a means to explore issues related to KMS and unifying dimensions underlying different types of KMS. The contingencies that we discuss: the size and diversity of networks, the maintenance of knowledge flows and the long term effects of the use of KMS provide a window into work in a number of reference disciplines that would enrich the utility of KMS and also open up fruitful areas for future research.

Many on-line interaction environments have a large number of users. It is difficult for the participants, especially new ones, to form a clear mental image about those with whom they are interacting. How can we compactly convey information about these participants to each other? We propose the data portrait, a novel graphical representation of users based on their past interactions. Data portraits can inform users about each other and the overall social environment. We use a flower metaphor for creating individual data portraits, and a garden metaphor for combining these portraits to represent an on-line environment. We will review previous work in visualizing both individuals and groups. We will then describe our visualizations, explain how to create them, and show how they can be used to address user questions. KEYWORDS: Information visualization, data portraits, user-centered visualization, interaction context.

Approaches This brings us to the question of how social cues might best be portrayed in a digital system. We see three design approaches to answering this question: the realist, the mimetic, and the abstract. The realist approach involves trying to project social information from the physical domain into or through the digital domain. This work is exemplified in teleconferencing systems and media space research---see Finn, et al. (1997) for many examples.