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Enhancing Discussion Forums with Combined Argument and Social Network Analytics

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Knowledge Cartography

Part of the book series: Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing ((AI&KP))

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Abstract

This chapter argues that we need new tools to support sensemaking in online discussion forums. An extensive comment forum on nuclear power was manually analysed in order to better understand the discourse and social dynamics unfolding with the online discussion. The analysis provides a proof of concept of how forum’s posts can be rendered visually as finer-grained discourse and social elements, which can then be aggregated into useful views and analytics to improve users’ understanding. We argue that by doing so readers can better make sense of the online conversation in two main ways. Firstly, they can better isolate claims, explore the relationships between different claims and assess the state of the debate without going through the reading of the entire discussion. Secondly, they can see, at a glance, the power relationships, coalitions and conflicts emerging with the online conversation, by exploring the rhetorical relationships between contributors. The paper concludes by proposing insights on the affordances of effective online discussion tools, and envisaging future research scenarios to enhance online dialogue with social network and discourse analytics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2008/09/nuclear-power-lynas-reactors

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Acknowledgements

This work was conducted in close collaboration with Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum and Michelle Bachler, who managed the research and development of the Cohere platform, which has been essential to this study. We are gratefully to Mark Lynas, who kindly consented to the use of his article to conduct research and agreed to the dissemination of the annotations of his work for research purposes. The Cohere platform was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (2008–12 OpenLearn and Open Learning Network projects). This work was finalised under the EC project CATALYST FP7 (Grant Agreement #6111188, 7th Framework Programme – Collaborative project FP7-ICT-2013-10, Thematic area ICT-2013.8.1).

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  1. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Anna De Liddo

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  1. Anna De Liddo
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Correspondence to Anna De Liddo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

    Alexandra Okada

  2. Connected Intelligence Centre, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

    Simon J. Buckingham Shum

  3. Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Science Education, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Tony Sherborne

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De Liddo, A. (2014). Enhancing Discussion Forums with Combined Argument and Social Network Analytics. In: Okada, A., Buckingham Shum, S., Sherborne, T. (eds) Knowledge Cartography. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6470-8_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6470-8_15

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