IBM Watson Research Center

Project: ForumReader Primary Researchers: Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Feinberg Contact: research@lotus.com A Collaborative User Experience Project: more about CUE... On-line bulletin boards, conversations, and newsgroups often become victims of their own success. As their popularity and size grow, they become more work to read: many on-line discussions are literally the size of a full-length novel. We're attacking this problem with ForumReader, a prototype application that helps people navigate and read large conversations. ForumReader uses a "text thumbnail" approach to provide a 10,000-foot view of a large body of text. We have deployed ForumReader in areas ranging from Slashdot threads to IBM's massive internal "Jam" discussions.