visualizing online comment spaces

How do you capture the essence of a conversation online? How can we visualize chats and forums? How can user generated content that usually follows news articles and blog posts take a more substantial role in the online conversation?

I am fascinated by the conversations formed in the comment spaces around articles and blogs. With the current way that comments are displayed as long lists, it is virtually impossible to comprehend the broad range of perspectives. For the past few weeks I’ve been looking at the comment space around articles on the US presidential campaign. The LA Times chose to present the thousands of comments (specifically the 7,972 between September 28th until today!). For this project I chose to use java with processing. The goal is to create a clear narrative/s around the essence of these comments, binding them together on different threads. It is not a simple task, as the comments usually do not relate to one another. Moreover, users submit comments usually under fake names – and when you do not know who exactly is talking, it is extremely difficult to have a conversation. So I chose to concentrate less on the ‘who’ and more on ‘what’: what are people saying about the candidates. Which words are they using more, and how they are choosing to describe the candidates.

playing around with the interface and aesthetics

An inspiration to this project is Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s Listening Post – displaying real-time conversations from online chat rooms.

(listening post photos courtesy of fenchurch @ flickr)

More updates and a link to the web-app VERY soon

[tags] visualization, campaign, 2008, primaries [/tags]