Supporting conversational awareness in text-based conferencing system

We describe awareness support for a text-based conferencing system. As a disincentive factor of socially-oriented communications on the text-based conferencing system, the lack of visual and auditory cues concerning conversational situations is pointed out. We have developed an application called the “Conversational Awareness Supporting Environment (COASE)”, which supports awareness in conversational situations by extracting awareness information from the messaging history and by visualizing conversational situations for users. Through our evaluation, we learnt that COASE makes it easier to recognize the conversational situation and facilitates socially-oriented communication