Coterie: A Visualization of the Conversational Dynamics within IRC

Social patterns are observable in real-world interactions as visual cues. Online, however, there are few visual cues available that can be used to see and understand social patterns. In this thesis, I suggest that many of these social patterns are still present in our interactions online in text chat; they are merely encoded in the textual interactions. This thesis presents Coterie, a visualization of the conversational dynamics of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. Through Coterie, viewers can see the social patterns that underlie the text interactions between conversants. Using the chat messages posted to an IRC channel by users, Coterie builds statistical models for individual and channel-level interaction based on existing real-world sociometric models. Coterie also automatically separates out conversations using a conversation model based on a word usage algorithm. This information is then presented to the viewer through a novel display based on models for real-world small group interaction, which allows the viewer to see historical patterns of user interaction, such as a user’s verbosity, as well as channel-level patterns, such as cohesiveness. The visualization is evaluated based on how well it makes such patterns visible, and further directions for its development are presented. Thesis Advisor: Judith Donath Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Coterie: A Visualization of the Conversational Dynamics within IRC