Displaying Asynchronous Reactions to a Document: Two Goals and a Design

Abstract: We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous text deliberation pertaining to a document: (1) visibility of relationships between comments and the text they reference, between different comments, and between group members and the document and discussion, and (2) distinguishability of boundaries between contextually related and unrelated text and comments and between individual authors of documents and comments. Interfaces for document-centered discussion generally fail to fulfill one or both of these goals as well as they could. We describe the design of the new version of Deme, a Web-based platform for online deliberation, and argue that it achieves the two goals better than other recent designs.