Developing legible visualizations for online social spaces

Although constructed for researchers to share news and information, Usenet quickly developed into a social environment with varied styles of interactions. Unfortunately, the browsers developed to view the shared messages fail to effectively convey the rich social features of a newsgroup, let alone all of Usenet The goal of our research is to use the salient features of social interaction to build a "legible" interactive visual representation of Usenet. We introduce our approach to developing this type of visualization, discussing our theoretical framework, questions considered to access the socially salient features, and a series of design iterations used for exploring the way to develop a visual language that conveys social meaning. Although this paper represents a work in progress, we hope that this approach and our initial iterations help build a framework for future directions.