Paula S. Newman

Exploring discussion lists: steps and directions

This paper describes some new facilities for exploring archived email-based discussion lists. The facilities exploit some specific properties of email messages to obtain improved archive overviews, and then use new tree visualizations, developed for the purpose, to obtain thread overviews and mechanisms to aid in the coherent reading of threads. We consider these approaches to be limited, but useful, approximations to more ideal facilities; a final section suggests directions for further work in this area.

Summarizing archived discussions: a beginning

This paper describes an approach to digesting threads of archived discussion lists by clustering messages into approximate topical groups, and then extracting shorter overviews, and longer summaries for each group.

Reading and writing fluid Hypertext Narratives

We describe a new way to present and author hypertext narratives. The Fluid Reader constructs a unified interactive text from the content of multiple nodes and allows a reader to explore alternative paths within it. The Fluid Reader has been available as a hands-on museum exhibit for nearly a year to date, where it has been enjoyed by readers of all ages. Its success has prompted further interest and development in Fluid hypertexts. We have designed and implemented an authoring tool called the Fluid Writer that uses a new treetable visualization to help authors construct and manage alternative paths in a Fluid hypertext. Finally, an exploration of the narrative implications of Fluid hypertext suggests that it may be more suitable than conventional hypertext for formulaic fictions such as mystery stories.

Email archive overviews using subject indexes

Archived discussion lists are becoming significant reference sources. This paper describes a new type of overview for such lists, using a back-of-the-book style index containing headwords selected from subject lines and subentries derived from their subject-line-contexts.