Chris Dent has posted a summary of his UnRev II mailing list visualisation (if I may misuse the term) project, as Creating conceptual access: faceted knowledge organization in the Unrev-II email archives, in conjunction with Kathryn La Barre (Actually, she's first author, so I may have the attribution reversed). It's an interesting piece about visualising content on a specific mailing list, as well as some forward directions as to how such could be improved.

Like a lot of these sorts of things, I'm impatient for a couple improvements (without denying the high-worth of these sorts of experiments!). I'd like to be able to manage this sort of view in near-real time, which would probably necessitate better automation of concept analysis. In my dream world, I'd like to see improvements such that the viewer can interact with the data (ala Touchgraph, which I believe Chris used). And beyond mailing lists, as I've discussed with some others, it would be very fruitful to tie this sort of analysis to real time chat. Odigo and other products approached this, but not very intelligently. In saying that, I expect there'd probably very funky shifting in any graph as messages came in, given the very informal nature even business chat can take. Nonetheless, something to look for.

Posted by esinclai at May 22, 2002 10:05 PM |