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Theory / Research
Innovative aspects of the project and particular research interest:
a) Information Visualization: The Conversation Map implements a method for visualizing thousands of email messages.
b) Computational Linguistics: The Conversation Map incorporates a set of novel, text processing algorithms that combine and interrelate social and linguistic analysis of a set of email messages.
c) Social Theory: The Conversation Map illustrates a new theory of discourse developed to understand and explore the phenomenon of very large-scale conversations (VLSC), online email exchanges between hundreds or thousands of participants.
Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. More information about Warren Sack's current work can be found at this website: http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack
Publications
- SACK, Warren: Discourse Architecture and Very Large-Scale Conversations, In: Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen, Editors: The Digital Order. Princeton, NJ forthcoming
- SACK, Warren: What does a very large-scale conversation look like? In: Leonardo: Journal of Electronic Art and Culture, 35:4, August 2002; earlier conference version in the Electronic Arts Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, CA, August 2001: 88-95; forthcoming in the book Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Editors: First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA 2004
- SACK, Warren: Artificial Dialectics, In: Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action and Change: DIAC-02 Symposium, Seattle, WA, May 16-19, 2002
- SACK, Warren: What does a very large-scale conversation look like? 2001
» http://www.sims.berk…SIGGRAPH01/wsack.html - SACK, Warren: Conversation Map: An Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations, In: Journal of Management Information Systems. Winter 2000-2001; earlier conference version appeared as Discourse Diagrams: Interface Design for Very Large Scale Conversations in the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Persistent Conversations Track, Maui, HI: IEEE Computer Society, January 2000
- SACK, Warren: Mapping very large-scale conversations, In: Cabinet: A Quarterly magazine of art and culture. Issue 2, Spring 2001; earlier conference version appeared in the Proceedings of DIAC 2000: Shaping the Network Society: The Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace, Seattle, WA: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, May 2000; reprinted in Katie Holten, Editor: Katie Holten and others Drawings. Instances. Collaborations + Texts, Dublin, Ireland, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and the Tûp Institute, 2002
- SACK, Warren: Conversation Map: A Content-based Usenet Newsgroup Browser, In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, New Orleans, LA: Association for Computing Machinery, January 2000; reprinted in Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, Editors: From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, New York 2002
- SACK, Warren: Design for Very-Large Scale Conversations, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge, MA, MIT Media Laboratory, February 2000
- SACK, Warren: Stories and Social Networks, In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Narrative Intelligence, Cape Cod, MA: American Association of Artificial Intelligence, November 1999; reprinted in Phoebe Sengers and Michael Mateas, Editors: Narrative Intelligence, Amsterdam, 2002
Secondary Literature
- GOHLKE, Gerrit: Cybermapping, In: European Photography, Number 72, Winter 2002/2003; article on mapping cyberspaces including full page image of the Conversation Map
- PAUL, Christiane: Digital Art. London 2003; image and discussion of the Conversation Map
- IPPOLITO, Jon and Joline Blais: The Edge of Art. London forthcoming; images and discussion of the Conversation Map
- WARDRIP-FRUIN, Noah and Brion Moss: The Impermanence Agent: Project and Context, In: Performing Arts Journal 70. 2002, pp. 52–83; discussion of the Conversation Map
- DODGE, Martin and Rob Kitchin: Atlas of Cyberspace. New York 2001; images and review of the Conversation Map
- RICHARD, Frances, Utterance is place enough: mapping conversation, In: Cabinet Magazine: A quarterly magazine of art and culture, Issue 2, Spring 2001, pp. 76-81; Review of the Conversation Map and other projects
References
- Sack´s student Nicolas Ducheneaut developed a specialized version of the Conversation Map for browsing Open Source Software development projects. More details can be found in his Ph.D. dissertation available from him: Nicolas Ducheneaut, The reproduction of Open Source Software programming communities, School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley (May 2003)
- Warren Sack: „Similar projects are ongoing at the MIT Media Laboratory (Judith Donath et al.’s Loom project); within the Social Computing group at IBM Watson Research Center (with Tom Erickson and others); at Microsoft Research (notably the work of Marc Smith and his colleagues in the Social Computing Group).“