Deliberative Citizenship, Online Deliberation, and Argument Visualisation (COMM3790 Guest Lecture)
Guest Lecture for the COMM3790 (Citizen Media) module of the undergraduate New Media programme in the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds
Research Fellow on an EU-funded project Background in Applied Computer Science Knowledge Representation The “Linked Data” Web Argument Visualisation In a nutshell I experiment with software to solve interesting problems
talk Introduce Online Deliberation from perspective of a technologist Explain important steps in Designing, Developing, and Evaluating OD technology Survey existing OD tools Introduce Argument Visualisation as a special technique used in some OD tools
A process of deciding whether to believe some claim or perform some action, or how to address some issue or achieve some goal. Individual What shoes should I wear with this outfit? Who do I believe would make the best Student-Union President? Group What movie should we watch? Group deliberation is the focus of Online Deliberation research. In particular, group deliberation about policy—What should we do (to address this issue)?
Deliberation Using the Internet to facilitate one or more aspects of group deliberation OD tools belong to larger family of “e-participation” tools that include e-voting, online petitions, tools associated with open-government movement, etc.
Online Deliberation? What features of the Internet / the Web make it suitable for facilitating group deliberation? Connectivity, Expression, De-centralised
Online Deliberation? What new developments on the Web have started to make Online Deliberation a realistic ambition? Web 2.0, new self-publishing platforms, social media, crowd-sourcing, multimedia, mixed modes of communication (synchronous and asynchronous)
Evaluating OD technology Some important design questions Will deliberation be moderated? Will participants be categorised (e.g. Experts vs. Lay Audience) or are all participants equal? What will be the mode of communication: Synchronous or Asynchronous? Will there be offline elements to the deliberation? Will participants be able to have one-to-one interactions through back-channels?
Evaluating OD technology Some important design questions Will contributions be public or private (to participants)? Will contributions be anonymous? Will contributions be structured or free-form? What sort of media will be used (Text, Images, Sound, Video)? Will the contributions be archived?
Evaluating OD technology User profiles and usage scenarios The above questions help to identify who will use the technology and what patterns of use the technology will support Now helpful at this stage to construct “mock” users profiles and usage scenarios
Evaluating OD technology Dimensions for evaluating OD tools—Technological Functionality to what extent are the usage scenarios implemented Usability to what extent can users achieve tasks without being hampered or distracted by design quirks
Evaluating OD technology Dimensions for evaluating OD tools—Communicative/Social Taken from Davies and Chandler (2011): Quantity number and length of contributions; number and proportion of users who contribute Quality range of viewpoints captured Inclusiveness matching demographics of target population Efficiency cost of contributing Efficacy consequences of deliberation (often ignored by technologists)
Evaluating OD technology Dimensions for evaluating OD tools—Communicative/Social Taken from Coleman and Moss (2012): Citizens’ experience Citizens’ own reflections on and evaluations of the experience of participating in the online Political efficacy Political efficacy of citizens and the policy outputs Deliberative quality Being careful not to apply too strict a definition of “quality” such that we harshly apply the label of “non-deliberative” to modes of expression used by marginalised sections of the public.
Evaluating OD technology A look at some OD tools Your Voice in Europe http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/consultations/index_en.htm CitizenSpace http://www.citizenspace.com/demo Climate CoLab http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/- /plans/contestId/4/planId/15201 US OGI http://exchange.regulations.gov/exchange/ By The People http://cdd.stanford.edu/polls/btp/ E-Democracy.org http://forums.e-democracy.org/
Argument Visualisation OD challenges Deliberation involves argumentation—i.e. offering justifications to backup claims. OD should ideally encourage best argument not loudest shout Users need to be able to make sense of competing opinions expressed during a group deliberation In OD there is the challenge of presenting complex arguments Argument Visualisation research offers potential solution
Argument Visualisation Argument visualisation Discipline that combines Information Visualisation and Design with Argumentation Studies Use range of graphical features: Typography, Colour, Texture, Shape, Position Use graphics to explicitly represent: The components of a single argument The relationships between arguments
Argument Visualisation Argument visualisation (cont’d) But it is not about replacing prose It is about revealing structure and connections that may be hidden in prose. AV researchers have been thinking about supporting deliberation for over two decades (see e.g. Conklin and Begeman (1988) “gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion”)
Argument Visualisation Issues with ArgViz Many different graphical conventions Different colour schemes Different layouts (left to right; top to bottom) Different granularity for argument structure
Argument Visualisation Issues with ArgViz No general literacy for reading argument visualisations People will have to learn to read argument visualisations in same way they learn to read prose or learn to read maps Argument visualisations are hard to produce Either structure and visualise the argument at the moment we are making it Or express the argument in prose and then have to interpret the prose in order to reconstruct the argument Researchers are experimenting with doing this automatically, but we are still a long way off.
Introduced Online Deliberation from perspective of a technologist Suggested types of questions asked in Designing, Developing, and Evaluating OD technology Surveyed existing OD tools Introduced Argument Visualisation as a special technique used in some OD tools Surveyed existing OD+ArgViz tools Introduced some issues with ArgViz
ahead to the seminar IMPACT Project is developing a set of prototypes for facilitating online, public deliberation of policies In the Centre for Digital Citizenship, Professor Ann Macintosh and I are developing an Argument Visualisation tool within this project You will see our approach to visualising complex arguments in a policy-consultation (an asynchronous policy-deliberation) You will have the opportunity to get your hands on and help evaluate a prototype tool for policy-deliberation
Coleman, S., & Moss, G. (2012). Under Construction: The Field of Online Deliberation Research. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9 (1), 1–15. Conklin, J., & Begeman, M. L. (1988) gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 140–152. Davies, T., & Chandler, R. (in press) Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence. In Nabatchi, T., Weiksner, M., Gastil, J., & Leighninger, M. (eds.) Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement
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