Group Communication Online
Two papers cited on the CHI-WEB list, and two others — a website and a paper — worth mentioning.
Examining the Effectiveness of Electronic Group Communication Technologies: The Role of the Conversation Interface[.pdf]
Argues that “different social and technical designs of electronic group communication technologies will influence various aspects of electronic group communication, such as level of participation, patterns of interaction and genres of communicative purposes”. It’s an obvious point, but from a quick look at the paper there’s some decent analysis and development.
Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes
Tom Erickson from IBM has done some great research on things like patterns for interaction design, the role of storytelling in design, and social interaction online. This paper examines properties that enable graceful face-to-face interaction, identifies three main characteristics — visibility, awareness, and accountability — and looks at an online chat system that tries to support these characteristics.
The Dynamics of Mass Interaction[.pdf]
From the AT&T Labs Research Group. Looks at the relationship between demographics, conversational strategies, and interactivity.
Conversation Map: An Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations
The Conversation Map system is a Usenet newsgroup browser that analyzes the text of an archive of newsgroup messages and outputs a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive. The Conversation Map system incorporates a series of novel text analysis procedures that automatically compute a set of social networks detailing who is responding to and/or citing whom in the newsgroup; a set of discussion themes that are frequently used in the newsgroup archive; and, a set of semantic networks that represent the main terms under discussion and some of their relationships to one another.