Enhancing discussion forums with combined argument and social network analytics

Abstract

This chapter argues that we need new tools to support sensemaking in online discussion forums. An extensive comment forum on nuclear power was manually analysed in order to better understand the discourse and social dynamics unfolding with the online discussion. The analysis provides a proof of concept of how forum’s posts can be rendered visually as finer-grained discourse and social elements, which can then be aggregated into useful views and analytics to improve users’ understanding. We argue that by doing so readers can better make sense of the online conversation in two main ways. Firstly, they can better isolate claims, explore the relationships between different claims and assess the state of the debate without going through the reading of the entire discussion. Secondly, they can see, at a glance, the power relationships, coalitions and conflicts emerging with the online conversation, by exploring the rhetorical relationships between contributors. The paper concludes by proposing insights on the affordances of effective online discussion tools, and envisaging future research scenarios to enhance online dialogue with social network and discourse analytics.