Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots

Zhou, Daniel Xiaodan, Oostendorp, Nathan, Hess, Michael, and Resnick, Paul. Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Proceedings of CHI08 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Florence, Italy, pp. 1009-1012.

Final pre-publication draft

ACM DL page, with citation info and final version. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357209

Abstract

Many sites on the web offer collaborative databases that catalog items such as bands, events, products, or software modules. Conversation pivots allow readers to navigate from pages about these items to conversations about them on the same site or elsewhere on the Internet. Double pivots allow readers to navigate from item pages to pages about other items mentioned in the same conversations. Using text mining techniques specific to the collection it is possible to find references to collected items in online conversations. We implemented conversation pivots for the CPAN archive of Perl modules, and for Drupal.org, the reference site for the Drupal content management system.