The last two weeks saw two different teams mapping the debate around the COP15 Climate Change conference, in the process putting two of the tools through their paces. The first team (Debategraph, Cognexus Institute and Seven Sigma) set up camp at CopenhagenSummitMap.org, using Debategraph to run live and post-hoc issue mapping sessions as the conference unfolded. Here’s a screen from the website:

…and the interactive Debategraph applet:

The second team [mission] came from the Hypermedia Discourse group at the Open University’s Knowlege Media Institute, who focused on testing their Cohere tool, in particular, its Mozilla browser Extension (works in Firefox & Flock) that supports semantic annotation of websites. The screen below shows the sidebar with different kinds of annotation in the margin, anchored to one or more text clips of interest:

This map illustrates the emerging network of ideas as multiple analysts annotated websites (half working on news  media, blogs and twitter, and half on Open Educational Resources, to assess the difference). These annotations were semantically connected in order to test the hypothesis that we could prevent the emergent web from degenerating into mere spaghetti, but instead, support a form of collective intelligence:

Individual Ideas (below), Connections or whole Maps can be embedded as interactive widgets:

Reflections on how these exercises went will be posted as we review the data.

Categories: Challenges, Tech. Groups
Tags: Cohere, Debategraph