Blogs, regularly updated online journals, allow people to quickly and easily create and share online content. Most bloggers write about their everyday lives and generally have a small audience of regular readers. Readers interact with bloggers by contributing comments in response to specific blog posts. Moreover, readers of blogs are often bloggers themselves and acknowledge their favorite blogs by adding them to their blogrolls or linking to them in their posts. This paper presents a study of bloggers’ online and real life relationships in three blog communities: Kuwait Blogs, Dallas/Fort Worth Blogs, and United Arab Emirates Blogs. Through a comparative analysis of the social network structures created by blogrolls and blog comments, we find different characteristics for different kinds of links. Our online survey of the three communities reveals that few of the blogging interactions reflect close offline relationships, and moreover that many online relationships were formed through blogging. 1.

This paper presents an analysis of online discussions in Open Source Software (OSS) design. The objective of our work is to understand and model the dynamics of OSS design that take place in mailing list exchanges. We show how quotation practices can be used to locate design relevant data in discussion archives. OSS developers use quotation as a mechanism to maintain the discursive context. To retrace thematic coherence in the online discussions of a major OSS project, Python, we follow how messages are linked through quotation practices. We compare our quotation-based analysis with a more conventional analysis: a thread-based of the reply-to links between messages. The advantages of a quotation-based analysis over a thread-based analysis are outlined. Our analysis reveals also the links between the social structure and elements in the discussion space and how it shapes influence in the design process.

This paper is a report on early user activity in Many Eyes, a public web site where users may upload data, create visualizations, and carry on discussions. Since the site launched, users have uploaded data and created graphics on everything from DNA microarray data to co-occurrences of names in the New Testament to personal gift-giving networks. Our results show that in addition to traditional data analysis, Many Eyes is used for goals ranging from journalism and advocacy to personal expression and social interaction. We propose several implications of this usage for visualization designers and contend that these findings suggest a role for visualization as an expressive medium. 1

Large-scale session log analysis typically includes statistical methods and detailed log examinations. While both methods have merits, statistical methods can miss previously unknown subpopulations in the data and detailed analyses may have selection biases. We therefore built Session Viewer, a visualization tool to facilitate and bridge between statistical and detailed analyses. Taking a multiple-coordinated view approach, Session Viewer shows multiple session populations at the Aggregate, Multiple, and Detail data levels to support different analysis styles. To bridge between the statistical and the detailed analysis levels, Session Viewer provides fluid traversal between data levels and side-by-side comparison at all data levels. We describe an analysis of a large-scale web usage study to demonstrate the use of Session Viewer, where we quantified the importance of grouping sessions based on task type.

Abstract. Georg Simmel [American Journal of Sociology 55:254–261 (1949)] is widely credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability – ‘‘the sheer pleasure of the company of others’ ’ and the central ingredient in many social forms of recreation and play. Later Ray Oldenburg [The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe & Company (1989)] extended Simmel’s work by focusing on a certain class of public settings, or ‘‘third places,’ ’ in which sociability tends to occur, such as, bars, coffee shops, general stores, etc. But while Simmel and Oldenburg describe activities and public spaces in the physical world, their concepts may apply as well to virtual or online worlds. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are extensive, persistent online 3D environments that are populated by hundreds of thousands of players at any given moment. The sociable nature of these online spaces is often used to explain their success: unlike previous video games, MMOGs require players to exchange information and collaborate in real-time to progress in the game. In order to shed light on this issue, we critically examine player-to-player interactions in a popular MMOG (Star Wars Galaxies). Based on several months of ethnographic observations and computerized data collection, we use Oldenburg’s notion of ‘‘third places’ ’ to evaluate whether or not the social spaces of this virtual world fit existing definitions of sociable environments. We discuss the role online games can play in the formation and maintenance of social capital, what they can teach us about the evolution of sociability in an increasingly digitally connected social world, and what could be done to make such games better social spaces. Key words: automated data collection, online games, sociability, third places 1.

As more people take part in online conversations, awareness of the varying conversational styles and social mores afforded by different software is growing. However, this awareness is largely built on personal impressions as varying styles of social interactions are hard to discover in text-based presentations. Through visualization we explore social and temporal interactions in instant messaging. CrystalChat visualizes personal chat history. Rather than showing online social networks that indicate merely who talks to who, CrystalChat reveals the patterns in an individual’s communications with those people who are part of their personal chat history. The patterns revealed come from instant messaging data that includes information about temporal clustering, conversation initiation, conversation termination, length of conversations, length of postings, patterns of repetitive or alternating postings, and emotional tone as represented by emoticons. communication is less rich than face-to-face conversations, thus, visuals are added to augment the communication itself [11,15,18]. Another reason to use visuals is to provide ways to better understand people’s interactions and the social networks that develop around them [7,10,11,21]. CrystalChat, an interactive visual representation of instant messaging data, falls into this latter category. 1.

Over time, many people accumulate extensive email repositories that contain detailed information about their personal communication patterns and relationships. We present three visualizations that capture hierarchical, correlational, and temporal patterns present in user’s email repositories. These patterns are difficult to discover using traditional interfaces and are valuable for navigation and reflection on social relationships and communication history. We interviewed users with diverse email habits and found that they were able to interpret these images and could find interesting features that were not evident to them through their standard email interfaces. The images also capture a wide range of variation in email practices. These results suggest that information visualizations of personal communications have value for end-users and analysts alike. Author Keywords Email, information visualization, personal communication

Abstract—We introduce the concept of a Visual Backchannel as a novel way of following and exploring online conversations about large-scale events. Microblogging communities, such as Twitter, are increasingly used as digital backchannels for timely exchange of brief comments and impressions during political speeches, sport competitions, natural disasters, and other large events. Currently, shared updates are typically displayed in the form of a simple list, making it difficult to get an overview of the fast-paced discussions as it happens in the moment and how it evolves over time. In contrast, our Visual Backchannel design provides an evolving, interactive, and multi-faceted visual overview of large-scale ongoing conversations on Twitter. To visualize a continuously updating information stream, we include visual saliency for what is happening now and what has just happened, set in the context of the evolving conversation. As part of a fully web-based coordinated-view system we introduce Topic Streams, a temporally adjustable stacked graph visualizing topics over time, a People Spiral representing participants and their activity, and an Image Cloud encoding the popularity of event photos by size. Together with a post listing, these mutually linked views support cross-filtering along topics, participants, and time ranges. We discuss our design considerations, in particular with respect to evolving visualizations of dynamically changing data. Initial feedback indicates significant interest and suggests several unanticipated uses.

Abstract. We present CodeSaw, a social visualization of distributed software development. CodeSaw visualizes a distributed software community from two important and independent perspectives: code repositories and project communication. By bringing together both shared artifacts (code) and the talk surrounding those artifacts (project mail), CodeSaw reveals group dynamics that lie buried in existing technologies. This paper describes the visualization and its design process. We apply CodeSaw to a popular open source project, showing how the visualization reveals group dynamics and individual roles. The paper ends with a discussion of the results of an online field study with prominent open source developers. The field study suggests that CodeSaw positively affects communities and provides incentives to distributed developers. Furthermore, an important design lesson from the field study leads us to introduce a novel interaction technique for social visualization called spatial messaging. 1

Abstract. As a result of growing misuse of online anonymity, researchers have begun to create visualization tools to facilitate greater user accountability in online communities. In this study we created an authorship visualization called Writeprints that can help identify individuals based on their writing style. The visualization creates unique writing style patterns that can be automatically identified in a manner similar to fingerprint biometric systems. Writeprints is a principal component analysis based technique that uses a dynamic feature-based sliding window algorithm, making it well suited at visualizing authorship across larger groups of messages. We evaluated the effectiveness of the visualization across messages from three English and Arabic forums in comparison with Support Vector Machines (SVM) and found that Writeprints provided excellent classification performance, significantly outperforming SVM in many instances. Based on our results, we believe the visualization can assist law enforcement in identifying cyber criminals and also help users authenticate fellow online members in order to deter cyber deception. 1