Argument Repertoire as a Reliable and Valid Measure of Opinion Quality: Electronic Dialogue During Campaign 2000

Clicking to Learn During the 2008 Presidential Election: Why Capturing Channel Switching Matters

“…3 Although there has been very little research on whether exposure to diverse points of view in news affects political knowledge (Lo & Chang, 2006), past research shows that exposure to multiple and diverse points of views in interpersonal networks leads to greater acquisition of political knowledge (e.g., Scheufele, Hardy, Brossard, Waismel-Manor, & Nisbet, 2006;Scheufele, Nisbet, Brossard, & Nisbet, 2004). Individuals in diverse social networks are likely to encounter opposing viewpoints and opinions in their political discussions (McLeod, Sotirovic, & Holbert, 1998) leading them to reevaluate preexisting political beliefs (Knight & Johnson, 1994) which in turn fosters political sophistication, a larger ''argument repertoire,'' and political knowledge (Cappella, Price, & Nir, 2002;Gastil & Dillard, 1999;Huckfeldt, Mendez, & Osborn, 2004).…”

Enabling Large-Scale Deliberation Using Attention-Mediation Metrics

“…We also presented a substantial model of exceptions and metrics for largescale deliberations, and demonstrated how semi-formal argument maps make it practical to define much more powerful metrics than for conventional (unstructured) social media such as email, web forums, and so on. While there has been substantial effort devoted to manually-coded, post-hoc metrics on the efficacy of on-line deliberations (Steenbergen et al, 2003) (Stromer-Galley, 2007) (Trénel, 2004) (Cappella et al, 2002) (Spatariu et al, 2004) (Nisbet, 2004), existing deliberation technologies have made only rudimentary use of automated real-time metrics to foster better emergent outcomes during the deliberations themselves. The core reason for this lack is that, in existing deliberation tools, the content takes the form of unstructured natural language text, limiting the possible deliberation metrics to the analysis of word frequency statistics, which is a poor proxy for the kind of semantic understanding that would be necessary to adequately assess deliberation quality.…”

Broadening Exposure, Questioning Opinions, and Reading Patterns with Reflext: a Computational Support for Frame Reflection

“…Similarly, our participants rarely described changing their opinions on an issue. However, even if it does not result in opinion change, this process of considering arguments that conflict with one's prior views is itself valuable (Cappella, Price, & Nir, 2002).…”