Developing Legible Visualizations for Online Social Spaces

Although constructed for researchers to share news and information, Usenet quickly developed into a social environment with varied styles of interactions. Unfortunately, the browsers developed to view the shared messages fail to effectively convey the rich social features of a newsgroup, let alone all of Usenet. The goal of our research is to use the salient features of social interaction to build a “legible” interactive visual representation of Usenet. In this paper, we introduce our approach to developing this type of visualization, discussing our theoretical framework, questions considered to access the socially salient features, and a series of design iterations used for exploring how to develop a visual language that conveys social meaning. Although this paper represents a work in progress, we hope that this approach and our initial iterations help build a framework for future directions.