Visualizing a computer mediated communication (CMC) process to facilitate knowledge management

ABSTRACT

The archive of a computer-mediated communication (CMC) process contains knowledge shared and implicit information about participants' behavior patterns during discussion. However, most CMC systems focus only on organizing the content of discussions. On the other hand, the social visualization research has developed techniques to depict human behaviors during a process of CMC but has not been integrated in any organizational memory system yet. In addition, the impacts of the graphical representations created by social visualization techniques have seldom been studied. The dissertation thus proposes a two-phase research to address those issues. The first phase proposes a prototype system that integrates a social visualization technique with various information analysis technologies to graphically summarize both the content and behavior of a CMC process. The second phase proposes to adopt the "de-featuring" approach used by previous interface evaluation studies to evaluate how the graphical interface developed affects users' information acquisition and evaluation process.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
computer-based communication systems, individual decision making, social visualization, user interface