Time: 4pm, Tuesday April 27
Place: 205 South Hall

                      Visualizing Conversations
                            Judith Donath
                            MIT Media Lab

Conversation is arguably the fundamental activity in the online world.
People converse in newsgroups, chatrooms, and mailing lists; they leave
messages on web pages and  hold forth in MUDs.  In the realm of
information, you are your words.

Today, most online conversations are textual: there is no visible
representation of the participants nor of the structure of the
conversation.  In such an abstracted world, it can be difficult to form
an impression of one's conversational partners and many of the
subtleties and nuances of real world conversation, with its complex
turn-taking and gestural accompaniment, is lost.

In this talk I will discuss approaches to making online conversations
visible,  looking at both ways of visualizing conversational archives
and at interfaces for synchronous discussion.  Topics will include
representations of social role and identity, approaches to reinventing
gesture, and the use of conversational archives as the building blocks
for virtual spaces.