Forum Visualizer: Visualizing an Online Discussion Forum Using Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Virtual communities play an important role in knowledge sharing and learning. Recent research has shown that knowledge management and knowledge sharing in virtual communities are important issues for researchers to study more. In addition, the notation of social networks and the methods of social network analysis have attracted considerable interest from social science research community. In this thesis, we developed Forum Visualizer, a web-based tool for visualizing an online discussion forum at a variety of scales with social network analysis techniques. The participants are 44 students from a class of Information Ethics at NTNU. Our goal is to provide a general, intuitive but useful tool for participants to help them understand the community in which they are a part of and find appropriate forum topics for interaction. These visualizations, therefore, are inherently designed to be interfaces for participants in the community rather than for observers, managers, administrators, etc.; their function is to provide a colorful sense of this abstract space, rather than to accurately depict its statistical features. Besides the graphs/sociograms we provide, data matrices are included to help them understand their sociograms easily and to be as a comparison for mapping their social patterns. We hope that this tool can help build a framework for future directions that every online discussion forum could apply to it as embedding functions for analyzing human interactions, finding great knowledge sharing methods, and exploring social patterns and structures.