CHI 9 9 1 5 - 2 0
MAY
1999
ACMISBN:1-58113-158-5
Senior
CHI D e v e l o p m e n t
Consortium
Making Interactions Visible: Tools for Social Browsing Elisabeth Davenport, Napier Business School, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK
[email protected]
Reuben Connolly, Robert Spence, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, UK
[email protected] [email protected]
ABSTRACT The authors describe the problem of 'community myopia': a lack of awareness of people and resources that might assist members of a community to carry out tasks. They present a prototype social browser in two stages: a basic computer based social network diagram using off-the-shelf application software and an advanced social browser using Netmap ®, a proprietary analytic and visualization software tool. Tradeoffs between fimctional capability and ease and pleasure in use are discussed KEYWORDS Social browsing, social cohesion, visual databases, visualization, prototype, navigation, community network. INTRODUCTION
Tools for social navigation are an important component of virtual communities [1, 2]. This paper describes a prototype social browser for real-world or hybrid communities which both allows participants to observe social interactions, and triggers social interactions where appropriate. The prototype is a response to a problem that emerged in fieldwork: community myopia, a lack of awareness of what and who is available to enhance social activities. In the case of the seniors in our field study, these include everyday tasks like finding someone to walk the dog, or help with shopping. Community myopia, however, may be taken as a general description of contexts where poor representation o f knowledge (or of 'knowers') inhibits social learning. BACKGROUND For the past year, the authors have collaborated on a project investigating the application of information technology to the enhancement of social activities in a community [3] in the west of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Kathy Buekner, Angus Whyte, Kirsty Barr, Communication and Information Studies Department, Queen Margaret University College Edinburgh, UK
[email protected] [email protected]
We have found a dissonance between perceptions of 'community' in the locality, and activities that might be said to constitute community. While many of our senior citizen participants think they live in an excluding environment characterized by cliques and cabals, key informants at public sites like the library, the pub, or the school (who see more than the other participants) describe a range of community activities, many of which reflect the neighborliness that individuals claim is lost from 'modem living'. We think that this dissonance raises an important issue - myopia, and its corollary, visibility - as factors that may influence a sense of community in any given locality. COMMUNITY MYOPIA People work with what is to hand; in terms of community interactions they will interact through a chain established by face to fac6 contact ('people you do things with'), backed up by phone contact. However lives are busy, time is short and things slip the mind. Our participants' narratives suggest their need for support in assembling a cognitive collage [4] of potential interactors. Our aim is to develop and evaluate interfaces that reveals as much as is necessary to expand the scope of interaction, where interactors wish to engage with each other.
Apart from privacy issues (not pertinent to this paper though a major issue), 'revealing as much as is necessary' raises the issue of representation. The effort required to engage with social network representations must be taken into account, in the context of which Spence's (1998) concept of gradient perception [5] is relevant. Below we review early prototyping work to inform the design of mechanisms to support social browsing among seniors. REPRESENTATION ONE: 'DRAW AND DESCRIBE' Two of the authors initially worked with a simple 'draw and describe' node and link diagram (the 'significant other diagram' or 'SO-gram'). This was used as a conversational prop in interviews with seniors and others, to elicit comments on who is significant in their lives [6].
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S e n i o r CHI D e v e l o p m e n t
Consortium
ACMISBN:l-58113-158-5
Participants were asked to comment on the nature of the ties that link them to valued others. Hand-drawn SO-grams are however of limited use as tools for users to represent and exchange details of their social networks. We therefore derived computer-based versions using Decision Explorer ~ and Inspiration 2 two 'off-the-shelf concept mapping applications, which allow nodes to be re-sized, moved, and linked to supporting information (photos, stories, and so on). Users may click on a node where a significant other is named, and both 1) find details of that relationship and 2) find out about their friends' networks in contexts that they themselves do not belong to. We carried out a rough evaluation of this tool, using members of the research team, and identified a paradox. It is clear that unless attributes of relationships are specified and constrained, the tools may in effect be more of a quagmire than social glue; as multiple networks may be difficult to represent in a manageable way.
CHI 99 15-20 MAY 1999
CONCLUSION In this brief scoping article, we describe t]ae problem of community 'myopia' and offer brief reviews of some approaches to representations of social browsing that might alleviate the problem. As with any other user group, browsing tools for seniors will only be appropriate where they engage those who play or work with them. We are currently conceptualizing a browser which offers the ease of use of 'Representation One' ('point and click') and emulates the capabilities of 'Representation Two'. Our presentation will provide examples of both modes, and report on further fieldwork with seniors. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We acknowledge partial funding of this work under the Living Memory Project (LiMe) (Esprit I3/25261). In addition, we wish to thank Queen Margaret University College for internal funding, Justin Robertson and Alex Barabesi for assistance with formatting and data gathering.
REPRESENTATION TWO: MOBILIZE AND EXTRACT Applications must also accommodate manipulation at a
certain level of complexity to provide insight that cannot be gained through other modalities. Otherwise, we will offer users little more than an awkward version of word of mouth chains of contact that they already exploit, and we will fail to reveal anything that can enlarge their scope of interaction. What is required is representation of the clustering of attributes into groups and classes, that allows matches to be made between those making requests and making commitments and, on the basis of a memory of previous exchanges, higher order 'agencies' to be established which can direct 'seekers' to 'satisfiers'. A browser that represents interactions in this way must also be engaging to use. We identified proprietary software that accommodates manipulations like those we wish to represent. In Netmap ®" node representations provide for the identification, classification and visualisation of typed links. The software3 offers various grouping strategies that may then be used to sort and display groups and relations derived from link types. A pilot study using data provided by student volunteers has indicated the feasibility of using this tool to analyse data representing their 'community interactions'. This software offers various features we believe seniors would value: the ability to visualise and reflect on one's current social network; and to do reconnoiter work, for example to evaluate whether local interest groups do interesting things, or to find potential companions for visiting local venues.
1 http://www.sa~epub.co.uk/scolari/decexp.html 2 http://www.teleport.com/inspirat/coinfo.html 3 Netmap® is a registered trademark of ALTA Analytics, Inc. http://www.ALTAanalytics.com/
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REFERENCES I. Dieberger, A. Supporting social navigation on the World Wide Web. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46 (1997), pp. 805-825. 2. Dieberger, A. Social connotations of spatial metaphors and their influence on (direct) social navigation. In Hook, K., Munro A. and Benyon, D. Eds. Workshop on Personalised and Social Navigation in Information Space, 16 - 17th March 1998. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, SICS Technical Report T98.2. Kista, Sweden, (March, 1998), pp. 5-14. 3. The Living Memory Project (LiMe) (Esprit 13/25261) http://www.living-memory.org. 4. Tversky, B. Cognitive maps, cognitive collages and spatial mental models. In Proceedings of European Conference COSIT '93, spatial Information Theory - a theoretical basis for GIS. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (1993), pp. 14 - 24. 5. Spence, R. A framework for navigation, Information Engineering Section Report 98/2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. London: 1998. 6. Davenport, E., Buckner, K. and Barr, K. SO-grams: work-in-progress on a simple conversational prop for navigating social space, In Hook, K., Munro A. and Benyon, D. Eds. Workshop on Personalised and Social Navigation in Information Space, 16 - 17th March 1998. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, SICS Technical Report T98.2. Kista, Sweden, (March, 1998), pp. 45-54. 7. Haythornthwaite, C. Social network analysis: an approach and technique for the study of information exchange. LISR, 18, (1996), pp. 323-342.
