Communication-Garden System: Visualizing a computer-mediated communication process

Archives of computer-mediated communication (CMC) could be valuable organizational resources. Most CMC archive systems focus on presenting one of the three aspects of a CMC community: discussion content, participants' behavior, or social networks among participants. Very few CMC archive systems support the easy integration of these three aspects. This paper thus describes two-phase research to propose an automatic approach that facilitates users' integrated understanding of discussion content and behavior of CMC participants. We validated the approach through the development and evaluation of a prototype system, the Communication-Garden system.