ForAVis : explorative user forum analysis

Abstract

User generated textual content on the internet has become increasingly valueable during the past few years. Forums, blogs, twitter and other social media websites are accessible for a huge amount of people all over the world. Hence, methods and tools are needed to handle this vast bulk of textual data. In this paper we present an explorative forum analysis system helping various stakeholders to cope with the task analyzing user generated content in online forums. The used mobile communication forums picture an example of user generated content in online discussion forums.Central to our system is a flexible visualization, which supports the analysis and exploration visually. Flexible means, that the ordering and the mapping of colors can be interactively changed by the analyst and the visualization is also capable to show the different structural levels of a user forum. The filter area offers beside well-known features many interesting features with respect to forum analysis, which we introduce in this paper. A detailed view of the particularly selected thread in the main visualization is presented in a third area. For a convenient manipulation and interaction we implemented intuitive mechanism. We describe the system and present various fictive user scenarios of different typical stakeholder tasks to illustrate the benefit of the system.