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Abstract
Online communities are extremely popular; yet most of them still rely primarily on 代写留学生论文 text for knowledge creation and communication. This paper describes a graphicalwebpoll prototype—a mix of information, knowledge, and social visualization—that has been designed and deployed in an online discussion board on herbal antidepressants. The prototype, hereby named the “plot-poll”, allows users to collaboratively construct a sequence of mini histograms that indicate experienced mood change during a ten week period. The pilot study shows that plot-polling is quite effective in engaging low-frequency contributors to participate. More work is required to support these findings, and reveal whether the graphic format is able to provide affective qualities to the user experience.

1. Introduction Online communities are an extremely popular form of web activity. People use them for learning, selling, investing, gaming and a host of other purposes including just passing time. Such communities range in size from anew dozen participants, to groups that number in the thousands, and are supported by software that ranges from ephemeral chat to 3D virtual environments. In spite of their diversity of purpose, and range of forms, most communication in online communities occurs via text. In this study, we are concerned with how to encourage participation in online communities, and in particular, participation by low frequency contributors. We also hope to increase the quality of the user experience overall, not only by increasing the coherence of contributions,https://www.51lunwen.org/liuxuelunwendx/ but through improving more difficult to measure affectivequalities.The premise of our work is that one means to this end into provide users with non- or less-textual ways of participating. Specifically, we believe that this can be achieved through a mix of information, knowledge, and social visualization. In this paper we describe visualization prototype—the plot-poll—that has been designed, implemented and tested in a pilot deployment inane existing online community. We begin by outlining the underpinnings of this work, briefly summarizing research on online communities, and then situating our approach to visualization relative to existing work. Next we describe the community for which the visualization was designed. After that, we describe the visualization itself, discussing the rationale behind its design and related issues. Finally, we outline its deployment, and the visualization’s reception and use by the community. We conclude by reflecting on our experience, and discussing future directions.

2. Background
2.1. Online communities Most online communities use text as the primary (and often only) means of communication. While text is powerful, we believe that providing additional modes of communication could increase the engagement and expressiveness of online environments. Efforts to engage users rarely go beyond the purely functional, such as the karma points in Slashdot.org [4] or stimulating participation through conversation channeling [13]. And, as Boyd et al. have remarked, “Nothing about the format differentiates a support newsgroup about HIV from discussion group about the Simpsons TV show” [1, p.1].Many researchers echo this sentiment, and have looked at the field of environmental design for inspiration. Wengerspeaks of inviting different levels本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。