1. 2010 CRC PhD Student Conference
A Debate Dashboard to Support the Adoption of On-line
Argument Mapping Tools
Ivana Quinto
ivana.quinto@unina.it
Supervisors Zollo Giuseppe
Iandoli Luca
Department/Institute Department of Business and Managerial Engineering
Status Fulltime
Probation viva After
Starting date February, 2009
Purpose – The literature affirms that an argument map is a representation of reasoning
in which the evidential relationships among claims are made wholly explicit using
graphical or other non-verbal techniques. Several web tools, also known as argument
mapping tools, have been developed so far, which apply an organizational and
visualization approach based on argument mapping (see i.e. Cohere, Deliberatorium,
Debategraph, Truthmapping, etc). Argument mapping provides a logical rather than
time-based debate representation of users’ contributions. This representation model has
proved to provide organizations with several advantages in knowledge sharing and
deliberation, such as: i. encouraging evidence-based reasoning and critical thinking
(Buckingham Shum and Hammond, 2004); ii. improving the understanding of wide
amount of knowledge; iii. driving conversation toward effective deliberation (van
Gelder, 2003); iv. expanding our capacity to grasp more complex discussions (Conklin,
2006).
Nevertheless those technologies still do not have widespread diffusion and the level of
adoption both in small and large scale organizations is low.
The aim of this paper is to investigate new technological solutions to support the
adoption of argument mapping tools as technology able to foster online knowledge
sharing and deliberation processes among remote workers and/or suppliers and
customers.
Literature suggests that the main barrier to adoption of mapping tools is, as for many
mediating tool, the loss of information and feedback during conversation. During a
conversation participants exchange, in addition to information, also evidences and/or
requests for evidences, which help them understanding if listeners have understood or
have not understood what the speakers have said (e.g., head nods or facial expressions).
Ones understood, information will be used to update participants’ shared information
(common ground). This process of making the understood information part of their
common ground is called grounding process (Clark and Brennan, 1991).The grounding
process is crucial for the success of a conversation, because it helps people to
increasingly understand each other. Clark and Brennan claim that a cognitive effort is
required by people in order to ground what speakers have said during a conversation. A
possible way to measure this effort is the evaluation of grounding costs, which may vary
on the basis of the medium used to converse.
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Online argument mapping tools leave users blind to a range of information that is
readily available in face-to-face interaction (Smith and Fiore, 2001) and this hamper the
level of acceptance by users.
This suggests that any mediated conversation has a higher grounding cost compared to
face-to-face conversation. Clark and Brennan (1991) and Kraut et al. (2002) identify ten
constraints that a medium can impose on conversation among people. These constraints
are desirable to reduce the ambiguity and grounding costs in conversation. Indeed, when
one of them is missing, there will be a higher grounding cost, since people will be
forced to use alternative grounding techniques.
Argumentation technology adds a further constraint to the conversation because it
forces users to respect pre-established communication formats and rules. Therefore, the
loss of immediacy, due to the formalization, coupled with the lack of information about
users, interaction processes, and generated content, entails the users a higher cognitive
effort and time consuming to learn how to use the tool. This makes the benefit/cost ratio
too low for the average user, thus causing limited adoption (Davis, 1989).
As the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) suggests, in order a technology to be
adopted, it is necessary that the benefits are higher than the costs deriving from the use
of it.
To tackle this problem, we propose a Debate dashboard in order to provide users with
visual feedback about the interaction between users and the content generated by them.
This feedback aims at reducing grounding costs and making the benefits associated with
using of arguments maps more evident.
The dashboard will be composed of visualization tools which deliver such feedback. We
will distil the Dashboard features by building on results of a literature review on Web
2.0 tools for data visualization. In particular we will select those tools that have proved
to help effectively representing huge amounts of data and to facilitate human
understanding so that salient information becomes apparent (Nguyen & Zhang, 2006).
Design/methodology/approach – We propose a literature review of existing
visualization tools. We analysed thirty visualization tools, which have been classified on
the basis of the kind of feedback they are able to provide. We identify three classes of
feedback: Community feedback (identikit of users), Interaction feedback (about how
users interact) and Absorption feedback (about generated content and its organization).
We have to clarify that we focused on visualization tools already implemented and in
use in real online communities and not on those that were only defined and projected
“on the paper”.
We analysed each of them to understand what are their key features, how they work,
what kind of feedback they provide, and if there are any “best practices”; in other
words, we used them to “inspire” the design and the implementation of the Debate
Dashboard.
As output of literature review, we selected the following six visualization tools (see
table 1):
As main criteria for the selection of the visualization tools, we considered:
• the number of feedback that each of them provides, in order to reduce the number of
used visualization tools;
• the combination of feedback, in order to provide all individualized ones.
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Table 1: Selected visualization tools
Visualization Chat Comment Conversation Exhibit PeopleGarden Wordle
Tool Circles Flow Map
II
Copresence X
Cotemporality X
Mobility X
Simultaneity X
Sequentiality X
Visibility X
Relevance X
Structuring X
Profile X
Activity Level X
Social/organiz X
ational
structure
As we have already mentioned, we consider these selected tools as a sort of starting
point. Indeed, our aim is the improvement of them through the addition of further
features and functions in order to make them more effective in providing feedback.
On the basis of these six visualization tools, we set up an early visual prototype of the
Debate Dashboard.
We will test the Debate dashboard both through mapping tool expert interviews and
through a survey with a semi-structured questionnaire.
The tests aim at verifying if, providing feedback about users, interaction process and
generated content, effectively reduces the grounding and sense-making costs; in other
words, we want to corroborate that this feedback reduces the users’ cognitive effort of
using online argument mapping tools.
Originality/value – Our paper enriches the debate about computer mediated
conversation and visualization tools. We propose a Dashboard prototype to augment
collaborative argument mapping tools by providing visual feedback on conversations.
The Dashboard will provide at the same time three different kinds of feedback about:
details of the participants to the conversation, interaction processes and generated
content. This will allow the improvement of the benefits and reduce the costs deriving
from the use of argument mapping tools. Moreover, another important novelty is that
visualization tools will be integrated to argument mapping tools, as until now they have
been used only to visualize data contained in forums (as Usenet or Slash.dot), chat or
email archives.
Practical implications – The Dashboard provides feedback about participants,
interaction processes and generated contents, thus supporting the adoption of online
argument mapping tools as technologies able to foster knowledge sharing among remote
workers or/and customers and supplier. Based on this assumption several achievable
advantages can be identified:
• Improvement of the coherence of discussion (Donath, 2002) - this feedback helps
users to participate the conversation in the right way, as it allows users to understand
participation rules, the structure of discussion and its evolution;
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• Easy individualization of workers’ knowledge, skills and competencies - this
happens because in every moment we can know who is talking about what and
therefore who has that information. This allows one to identify who are the “right”
people, who have the skills and knowledge to help co-workers and managers achieve
their goals (Danis, 2000);
• Development/Increase of awareness of presence and activity of other workers
(Erickson, 2000) - the awareness of activity of collaborators enables people to guide
their individuals efforts and contribute towards reaching a collaborative goal. This
plays an important role in enabling effective collaboration among distributed work
group members;
• Reduction of misunderstanding;
• Reduction of cognitive effort required to use mapping tools;
• Improvement of the exploration and the analysis of the maps - this feedback
improves the usability of the object (the map) improves, thus allowing users to pitch
into the conversation in the right place.
Keywords: Debate dashboard, On-Line knowledge sharing, Visualization tools,
grounding cost.
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References
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Clark, Herbert H. and Brennan, Susan E., 1991, “Grounding in communication”. In
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Danis, Catalina M., 2000, Extending the Concept of Awareness to include Statistic and
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