[ba-unrev-talk]: Tech Impediments? ... see Ka-Ping Yee's ZEST: AutomaticOutlining for E-mail Discussions (a proposal to incl. IBIS capabilities intoRoundup)
Ref. <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pingster/vertex/zest.html> (01)
Ka-Ping Yee's Proposal: (02)
[ ...]. "I propose a new summarization technique for e-mail
discussions, based on a conversation with Terry Stanley in 1997.
This technique does not require users to do any more work;
rather, it extracts structural information from the way that
messages are already written. (03)
[...]." The technique threads messages in sections by looking
for paragraph breaks and quoted text, instead of threading at
the granularity of entire messages. We can assume that a
paragraph immediately following a quoted section is a reply to
that quoted text. In the summary, a section is represented by
the sentences in its first two lines. This provides a much more
relevant overview of the content than simply repeating the
subject line. To keep the summary concise, not all sections
appear. Any section that replies to or is replied to by another
section appears; also, the first section of each message not
otherwise represented by some section appears. The result is a
point-counterpoint outline of the discussion that reads like a
conversation. Informal tests show that this technique can
produce a reasonable outline from real e-mail written by authors
with no knowledge of this tool. (04)
The basic technique is easily extended to allow users to easily
turn their outline into a structured argument map using a simple
typographical convention. By inserting a textual symbol (which
we call a "criticon") at the beginning of any paragraph, users
can tag the paragraph as one of four types: [?] marks a
question, [#] marks an informative comment, [+] marks a
supporting position, and [-] marks an opposing position. This
can also be extended to accommodate the informal voting
conventions that already exist on some mailing lists (for
example, the Apache and Python software development groups
already signal approval and disapproval in e-mail by writing
"+1" or "-1")." (05)
IMPACT ANALYSIS (06)
[...]. "This technology has the potential to transform every
mailing list into a cost-free reusable knowledge repository. The
outline becomes a collaborative workspace to which everyone
contributes. For example, in a design group it can serve as a
design history; in a political discussion forum it can become a
record of debate." (07)
INNOVATION (08)
"Current mailing list tools [Mailman] and bulletin-board systems
[Slashdot] arrange messages in threads to show chains of reply.
In the thread view, messages are typically presented by showing
their subject line, yielding a view where the same subject line
is repeated many times. Because users still have to visit and
read each message in turn in order to understand what has been
said, the only way they can gain context is to read an entire
archive. (09)
Structured discussion frameworks have been previously proposed
[Flores], and graphical tools for interacting with them have
even been prototyped [Conklin]. However, they impose a rigid
formalism that the users have to learn, and they require all
interaction to take place within a special software system. This
led to only limited use of the tools. The technology proposed
here is designed to work with existing e-mail practices, which
have an extremely broad audience. Using the techniques proposed
here, we can bring the power of structured discussion systems
like IBIS [Kunz] to a wide audience without the associated
inconvenience and rigidity. (010)
Many other visualizations of online discussions have been
developed [Donath, Rohall]. However, in all such visualizations,
the units of representation are entire messages. Overviews in
these visualizations show no message content, only metadata such
as the subject line or author." (011)
DEVELOPMENT PLAN (012)
"A prototype tool has already been developed that works with
existing e-mail folders in the standard Unix text format. It
generates one HTML file for each message and one for the
outline. The program flexibly handles a variety of quoting
styles, including those generated by most popular e-mail clients
(such as Pine, Outlook, and Emacs). Figure 1
<http://lfw.org/ping/criticons/> shows an example of the output
from running the prototype tool on mail from a real mailing list. (013)
I plan to develop this tool as an open-source package to be used
with Mailman, the GNU mailing list manager. Informal feedback
from the Mailman and Python communities has been positive and
enthusiastic. (014)
User testing will be conducted to optimize design variables such
as layout, the amount of content to include in the outline view,
and the best order in which to present points in the outline." (015)