Overview of the Argument Visualisation and Tracking tool (AVT)
Dear All
Neil and I would welcome your comments on this, our first posting about the AVT tool.
This post provides an overview of the tool. Later this week we will send a second post which will describe how a Policy Analyst might use the tool.
There are pictures in this email so you may have to adjust your html setting in your email account in order to see them.
The Argument Visualisation and Tracking tool (AVT) is the IMPACT tool being developed at the Centre for Digital Citizenship, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. The AVT supports the work of relevant actors by enabling them to navigate through arguments contained in relevant consultation and policy documents. Specifically, the AVT displays arguments about policies as browsable debate maps. Users can browse these debate maps about public policies and follow links from the visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents. Thus, the AVT is designed to help users make sense of the range of publicly expressed opinions about public policies. Indeed, it is part of the class of tools often referred to as "sense-making" tools.To achieve this goal, the AVT is being based on the state-of-the art methods and tools in the field of computer-supported argument visualisation (CSAV). With this end in mind, the AVT is powered by the Cohere argument visualisation tool developed at the Open University (Buckingham Shum, 2008).
One of the major challenges we face in using argument visualisation tools is their current poor usability when displaying large-scale argument maps. In order to address this challenge we are basing the AVT tool around two main concepts. The first concerns document-centricity. The main IMPACT usage scenario involves an organization publishing a policy-consultation document in order to solicit feedback from relevant stakeholders. Thus, the argument maps generated by the AVT are anchored in this policy-consultation document, and all arguments generated by stakeholders are entered into the argument maps with links to the original policy-consultation document. In this way all visualized data in the AVT tool will have a connection to the original consultation document. This document-centricity is important since the policy-consultation document is central to our underlying objectives of achieving transparency and understanding in the argument map. Furthermore, this document-centricity promotes sense-making for users joining at any time during a lengthy consultation period as they can see how their arguments fit within the ongoing policy-deliberation process consultation. Finally, this document-centricity gives confidence to the policy-makers that the contributions provided by stakeholders are on-topic and relevant.
The second concept concerns visualising the potentially large amounts of information contributed during a consultation. In order to allow users to get an overview of the vast amount of information and to be able to appreciate which issues are causing the largest debate we are adapting a special kind of visualization called the “treemap”, which has been pioneered by Ben Shneiderman (Shneiderman, 1992) in the field of Information Visualization. Adapting this technique, we will create “issue maps” which will use colour-coded rectangular blocks to depict issues within the debate. The different sizes of the rectangles indicate the comparative number of arguments associated with each issue. In this way, one of the first screens/views of a consultation a user will get will be a treemap of the questions asked within the Green Paper – with size of the each rectangle dependent on the responses at that time to the question.
Clicking on a rectangle takes the user to the arguments addressing that issue, where the arguments are displayed using the more conventional argument visualization technique of argument-network diagramming.
We welcome any feedback as it relates to these two concepts of “document-centricity” and “issue-mapping”.
Any comments or questions?
References
Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation. 2nd International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA '08) (pp. 97–108). IOS Press.
Shneiderman, B. (1992). Tree visualization with tree-maps: 2-d space-filling approach. ACM Transactions on Graphics , 11 (1), 92-99.
Regards
Ann
Ann Macintosh
Professor of Digital Governance,
Co-Director Centre for Digital Citizenship,
Institute of Communications Studies,
University of Leeds
Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
Email: A.Macintosh@leeds.ac.uk
