Strange Aeons

Some of my more recent research has been into new, or at least improved, ways to make the web a more conversational place. In one sense it already is, we can link to stuff and we can comment on posts. This isn't always sufficient though. In reverse order, not all sites support commenting and even when they do comment support on websites can still be done better than it is right now as it can be difficult to mine, evaluate and analyse the insightful comments. I feel that a web conversation works better when it is a part of the Web, a strand of conversation that interleaves the various sites spread across the web leading a person, whether a spectator or part of the conversation, to engage in chance discovery. Linking is the primary structure of the web. Hyperlinks enable us to create uni-directional links between one site and another, so that when we wish to refer to another site, for example, when commenting in our own blog upon a claim made in another, we link to that originating source site. These links are only one way however, so I can refer to another site, but they have to respond to me if the conversation is to be reciprocal. This does not however stop any other web users from responding to my post in any way that they see fit. This gives us a very egalitarian system, with minimal structure, in which the web itself supports conversation - it is up to the conversation's participants to engage in it and make it happen. A nice example of this kind of web conversation occurred with the recent discussion between John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Joe Wilcox of Oddly Together. This spat basically boiled down to the suggestion by Joe that Daring Fireball should allow comments on posts because otherwise Joe has to respond to Daring Fireball posts on his own blog and John's response that "you write on your site; I write on mine". I think that that is exactly how it should be and that the web is a better place for it. I think that comments enable an immediacy of response but they don't guarantee that your response will stay in place. The only way to ensure that your response stays online is to post it in a place that you control with a link back to the original. Even better, if those two hadn't disagreed then I wouldn't have discovered this post about "Conversational Journalism" by Doreen Marchionni which to me echoes the argument that Alan Rusbridger made in his Hugh Cudlipp lecture (which I commented upon before). There are also many sites that are primarily designed to support conversation such as the Web 2.0 sites like Twitter but for the most part these lead us into a walled garden, with poor support for conversational threads and, due to the limitations of microblogging, the increased use of link shorteners which, whilst not breaking the links in the web, certainly weaken its structural integrity. From the perspective of the Twitter business this makes sense, the lock-in part anyway, you want to be the only game in town, but from the perspective of the web, this is a systemic weakness because a huge portion of web traffic, much of the web conversation, is occurring on a single site, a single point of failure. This is not to say that I am "against" Twitter, far from it, I like the idea of microblogging and to me it provides the basis, but not a complete solution, for enhanced distributed web conversation. It is just that I prefer open and distributed systems to closed and proprietary ones - mainly because when things break, and things always break, you can't fix them, you have to wait for someone else to do that. The next stages, as I see it, are twofold:

1. to provide aggregation mechanisms so that we can get different views on the conversations, for example, following it in whichever direction we like, instead of just following the uni-directional links, or exploring a particular sub-thread of the conversation.
2. to provide new tools to make it easier to engage in the conversation.

The first stage can be accomplished by building upon the Argument Interchange Format, at least in the guise offered by its second version which includes support for dynamic argumentation structures, including dialogues, rather than just static, monological argument. By utilising open, distributed, web-conversation repositories to store meta-information about the relationships between conversational utterances, much like trackbacks and pings enable a form of bi-directional linking, we can start to build new interfaces to engage with and track the web conversation. The second stage will be accomplished by the tool-builders, a process that is partly happening already with the advent of tools to enable Twitter users to tweet from wherever they want and with new and improved blogging and microblogging platforms such as Tumblr and Posterous making it easy to create short posts as a part of the web conversation.

Wow, where did the last month go? I am recently back from the second Argument Interchange Format (AIF) meeting which was held at the Dalmunzie Hotel in rural Scotland. The list of delegates to this meeting read like a who's who of online argumentation researchers - people who are developing argumentative tools which, in some way, communicate argumentative information between themselves and to their users. All in all the meeting went well. We achieved the aim of writing a first draft of a specification for the second AIF which includes fixes for many of the problems we have discovered since the original format was specified and introduces some new elements that many of us have noticed were glaringly omitted from the original. In terms of running and organising the event, there were some things that went really well such as:

• Ensuring that all delegates prepared a position statement beforehand so that rather than meeting and starting with "what are we going to talk about" we got straight to the job of discussing the next version of AIF.
• The first night over dinner we all wrote questions onto post it notes that framed the sorts of things that we were interested in. These were used to create a number of topic/discussion groups (which later became major organising elements of the paper draft) and whittle the 23 delegates into a manageable number of working groups with shared interests.

Other things of course worked less well, for example,

• 23 computer scientists using Google Docs to collaboratively edit documents is fine. Except when you are in rural Scotland where your internet feed is provided via two-way satellite communications which are very quickly saturated, and suffer from fairly high latency anyhow.

Some lessons learned:

• Google Docs works quite well for collaboratively editing documents. Who knew? It even works well if you are using it to collaboratively edit LaTeX source, although obviously you don't get to compile it to anything useful or check source errors within Google Docs.
• Make sure that people aren't editing offline then copy-pasting into the Google Doc, as each time they do this they reintroduce the same errors that you just got finished fixing. (This one caused both myself and John to swear quite a bit)
• If you are working with LaTeX then don't forget to install it onto your laptop before you go as you then have to shell into a remote server which has a working LaTeX environment in order to compile the aforementioned LaTeX source into a PDF.
• Set up a local network using a small wireless access point and make some shared directories available on a small server such as a mac mini so that you are not transmitting all that data over the hotel's network all the time. We caused the Hotel to have to reset their router several times over the course of the meeting.
• Investigate collaborative software, such as Gobby, or a versioning system such as Mercurial that can run on the local server to keep track of the collaborative edits rather than relying on Google Docs. Although Google worked reasonable well I still had to go through the following steps to get a PDF generated:

1. Download the document from Google Docs as a txt file & save it as .tex file
2. Run the tex file through dos2unix
3. Get rid of any final non-printable ascii characters using the following:

   $ tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' < file-with-binary-chars > clean-file

4. Compile as usual.

My favourite element of the new specification is the inclusion of support for dynamic argumentation. I had attended the meeting with a clear personal plan to ensure that the AIF2.0 include support for dialogue and I was assigned to the working group on dialogue with Bart Verheij, Raquel Mochales , and David Glasspool. One of the things that quickly became apparent was that thinking of the AIF in terms of monologic and dialogic argument was quite limiting and that other researchers had quite clear needs which wouldn't covered by an AIF which accounted for just arguments and dialogues. Instead what we developed was a model that saw the core AIF, version 1.0, as a model of static arguments and AIF2.0 as including both this as well as dynamic extensions that enable us to model not just dialogue but also other aspects of dynamic argument such as representing the order of argument elements for when analysing rhetorical and presentational aspects of an argument (thanks Raquel) and the history of the construction of an argument (thanks David).

"a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgements; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority."

This struck me as interesting and succinctly defines one of my more recent research activities which has revolved around designing interactions, and associated software infrastructure, to support online argumentation. By this I mean the necessary software and infrastructure to provide support for those people who want to:

• exercise their own judgement,
• create their own content,
• articulate their own views, and
• learn from their peers

just as Alan mentioned in his lecture. Although many of these activities can already be performed by those who are sufficiently able and motivated, the supporting technology is still rudimentary. Just as we are still trying to develop the best persuasive interfaces to influence behaviour, we are still trying to develop the best interfaces to support online argumentative interaction and thereby improve critical literacy. There are at least two approaches that we can take. One approach is via education, for example, my introductory undergraduate module in problem solving and critical thinking is exactly the kind of introductory course that should be a prerequisite for anybody who wants to be able to say that they have had an education. Not that my module is perfect, far from it, just that the nature of the module; teaching students how to discover the structure of arguments, to see where there are holes or errors in the reasoning, to recognise when a rhetorical trick is begin used against them; these are all the kinds of skills that members of a knowledge society should possess. At the moment this is also the kind of topic that is left to a kind of inate ability, some people are just good at arguing, and others are good at being mislead by those in the know. However education doesn't solve the problem of lack of explicit support in the infrastructure that we use to communicate. This leads directly to my second approach: building the tools that support online argument, enabling people to create their content, whilst also guiding and supporting the process of articulating viewpoints and exercising judgements. My initial prototype for an argublogging system was outlined in a CMNA workshop paper last summer and uses nothing more than the web simpliciter, some browser situated javascript, and an aggregation server, to begin the process of supporting web users who have just read something online that they agree or disagree with and want to respond. Of course it is easy to respond online, anyone can set up a blog in minutes and link back to the original. The problem is that ordinary links carry very little information other than the fact that one place links unidirectionally to another. Much of the contextual information about how you are responding is lost, for example, to know whether I am supportive or antagonistic with respect to the quote above from Rusbridger's lecture requires a reader to read and understand this post. Wouldn't it be nicer if that relationship was recorded? Even better, wouldn't it be great if you could see whether anybody else had responded to any aspects of this post elsewhere on the web? Ideally you would structure all of those quotes and responses into a single dialogue, gatherered from all of their locations across the web, possibly you might even want to visualise this dialogue, seeing the structure of the various arguments that make up the dialogue. Essentially this is what my argument blogging system does, enables web users to harvest textual quotes and respond to them within a structured dialogue. This structure is captured and stored in a web-accessible database (AIFDB), in an RDF language that reifies the Argument Interchange Format, and thus becomes a Semantic Web data source, ripe with all of the potential that that entails.

What?

In a previous post I mentioned the WWAW (pronounced WOW), or World Wide Argument Web, an unwieldy name for what is mostly referred to as simply the Argument Web. My Argument Blogging project, that I have posted about here, is a part of this Argument Web which is essentially a network of loosely coupled online applications and services that provide a web of argumentation resources.

One way to think of the Argument Web is as a way to work with information on the Web. If the Web/Web2.0 is basically a semi-structured mass of data oriented towards mark-up for human consumption, then we can see how there are different ways to work with that data that are not necessarily primarily human-oriented. For example, to do automated parsing of Web data we might look to Semantic Web technologies for structure and reasoning mechanisms useable by machines. For human-orientation we look to the Web (WWW) simpliciter or else the Web 2.0 if we want more interaction. If we wanted to work with the Web in terms of arguments and associated argumentative interactions such as dialoues and conversations then we would look to the Argument Web.

The Argument Web exists in relation with and in addition to the existing webs of data and simply provides an infrastructure and tools for eliciting, structuring, and storing data in terms of arguments and related concepts, and for subsequently interacting with that data.

Why?

There are a number of reasons that an argument web is interesting. To begin with, argumentation and dialogue protocols can be used to provide a good way to elicit knowledge. Dialogue protocols provide a good human oriented interaction mechanism for both eliciting data from users and for communicating it back to them at a pace and in an order of their choosing. Allied to the this is the fact that knowledge elicitation via dialogue games allows us to capture metadata about how the units of information relate to each other. This can be sufficiently well structured that the data can be reused in automated reasoning systems, for example, as knowledge bases within intelligent agents. This is an avenue that Chris and I explored in an IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal paper a couple of years ago [reed2007magtalo :: "Using Dialogical Argument as an Interface to Complex Debates"]. Additionally, this approach provides a way to begin building a truly large scale corpus of well structured, real-world argumentation which will be an invaluable resource for argumentation researchers. Obviously this is not an exhaustive list by any means but covers the central points that make it interesting to me.

How?

The Argument Interchange Format, known as AIF, is a high level ontology of argumentation theoretic concepts that is used to communicate information about argument structure. This communication can occur between people, for example, argumentation researchers who discuss concepts such as Information Nodes( I-Nodes) and Scheme Node (S-Nodes) or who use the graph-based AIF ontology to visualise the structure of arguments and the reasoning contained therein. Communication of AIF concepts is however not restricted to people but has a number of computer implementations, for example, in RDF and OWL-DL meaning that argumentation data can be shared between programs.

The AIF-DB is a web-app for storing AIF data. It consists of a database and a RESTful interface for getting AIF data into and out of the database and also for searching it’s contents. The advantage of adopting a technology like the AIF-DB is that, unless you have special requirements over how your AIF data is stored, you have a ready made database and API that you can use from your application. This has simplified the process of building new argument software for the web and has been used as a core element in a number of new pieces of ArgumentWeb software including:

• OVA – An online agument analysis tool similar to Araucaria
• OVAView, the argument visualisation widget,
• The Argument Blogging software,
• ArgDB – An online corpus of analysed arguments which is the latest incarnation of the original AraucariaDB, the first large corpus of analysed arguments.

Floris sent me a link to this advert for a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law. The advert relates to a new FP7 project called IMPACT (not to be confused with Chris’ IMM-PACT EPSRC funded project) which aims to do the following:

IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.

What is of particular interest to me is the idea of building new tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources on the web – very similar to the argument blogging approach to online argumentation that I have been working on recently. The main difference here though is that the prospective IMPACT tools appear to be aimed at working with the web as a static resource whereas argument blogging is meant to be an active, user-centered activity, although one extension that I am looking at is to integrate active, “no I disagree because…” type arguments with “and here is a resource to prove it…” type arguments, which I see as being a mixture of both active and static argumentation. Also similar is Mark’s OVA software, an online argument analysis tool similar to Araucaria, although currently this can only be used to analyse a single web resource not collate and resuse arguments across multiple sources.

Interestingly this project will use the LKIF, understandable given the domain in which the project is to be executed, but it makes me wonder about the possibility of tools to translate between AIF & LKIF so that resources from one domain can be accessed by tools from the other and vice versa.