Visual Analytics of Online Communication

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Visual Analytics of Online Communication"

by

Mr. Siwei FU


Abstract:

Increasing categories of electronic communication platforms, such as 
instant messaging, Email, forums, and the like, have facilitated 
communication and collaboration among people worldwide. A large amount of 
online communication data generated by these platforms is collected and 
has accumulated, providing opportunities for analysts to understand 
communication patterns and facilitate decision making. An example is that, 
MOOC forums are becoming central hubs where students are able to interact 
with instructional staff. The analysis of MOOC forum data is beneficial to 
understanding class dynamics and preparing courses for the next iteration. 
However, such analysis is challenging due to the large, complicated, and 
heterogeneous nature of online communication data. Information 
visualization has been proven effective in understanding enormous amounts 
of such data by turning it into visual representations to exploit the 
pattern recognition capabilities of the human visual system.

In this thesis, we propose three advanced visual analytics systems for 
understanding online communication data in various domains. The first 
system, iForum, is designed to investigate the three interleaving aspects 
of MOOC forums, that is, users, posts, and threads, at different 
granularities. Second, we present visForum, a novel visual analysis system 
for interactively exploring, comparing, and tracking conversation groups 
in online forums. To validate the effectiveness and usefulness of the 
aforementioned two systems, we conducted case studies with domain experts 
for both systems and one user study for visForum. The third system that we 
propose is T-Cal, an interactive visualization system to understand team 
conversation data from different perspectives. This system has the 
potential to help analysts understand team collaboration strategies for 
modern team messaging platforms, such as Slack.


Date:			Friday, 11 May 2018

Time:                  	10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3494
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Huamin Qu (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Pedro Sander
 			Prof. Chiew-Lan Tai


**** ALL are Welcome ****