I Browsers to Support Awareness and Social Interaction 2

are the Web’s main features that have enabled online communities to abound and flourish. However, the Web is lacking cues and browsing mechanisms for the online social spaces. That is, such spaces look and feel abstract and informational rather than inviting for social interaction. Consequently, newcomers and occasional visitors to such sites cannot quickly assess who the participants are; what the purpose, tenor, and norms of the space are; which sorts of newcomers are welcomed; and what forms of participation are valued. Thus, users need support for social browsing in such spaces. On the flip side, active contributors to social spaces (such as Web communities) lack the means to present a public face to visitors. Gathering places in the physical world, in contrast, reflect artifacts, patterns, and traces of social presence, activities, and organization. They convey the life, character, relationships, and social cues that are important for social interaction and organization. Such social information and patterns exist in the electronic world but are buried in the content-centric information. (For more information see the “Social Visualizations” sidebar.) The challenge of creating social browsing tools to access such social information and patterns is of interest as a visual analytic problem for two reasons. First, unlike traditional users of typical visual analytic tools, Web community visitors and participants are neither necessarily literate on visualizations, nor do they view their social inquiry activities as explicit forms of visual analysis activities. Hence, these users of social browsing require tools that focus not only on information visualization but also on visual design and user support mechanisms. Second, to apply visualization techniques to the domain of social computing and the problem of providing cues and conveying social dynamics in online communities, we would apply visual analytics to the Visual Analytics