Visualizing Social Documents as Traces of Collaborative Activity in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

Abstract

Enterprise collaboration platforms are large-scale information infrastructures that provide a wide range of tools and functionality to support collaborative work in organizations. These collaborative activities leave digital traces in the form of social documents, which can be analyzed to understand how employees work together to coordinate their joint work. In this paper, we present the findings of a research project to visualize the structure of social documents to prepare them for analysis as traces of collaborative activity. Using the representation of social documents defined in the Social Document Ontology (SocDOnt), we draw on concepts from graph theory to develop a method for the graphical visualization of social documents. Applying this method to analyze the social documents in an operational enterprise collaboration platform, we identify and display different types of social documents and define their characteristic structure. Our findings provide the necessary foundation for conducting computational ethnographies of collaborative work.Social documents as digital traces of collaborative activity are complex, compound documents created by the use of social software and composed of heterogeneous components [11]. For the investigation of their structure, Hausmann and Williams [11] derived a conceptual information model and provided a first structural description of their nature and a list of possible components, such as versions, comments, attachments, tags

The Structure of Social Documents

“…The research and development of SocDOnt have provided a necessary foundation and enabled us to continue our research work through the development of methods for visualizing [27] and analyzing [37] social content to trace collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration systems.…”

Metrics for Analyzing Social Documents to Understand Joint Work

“…It can also be used to create a collaborativity index similar to the ones suggested by [13] and [28] described above. [21]…”

“…The metrics can be calculated and displayed on the workgroup level with the help of a tool (Content Dashboard). The development and evaluation of this tool has been documented in [21].…”

“…The UniConnect platform is a large-scale integrated enterprise system that provides comprehensive features such as task management, blogs, files, forums, status updates (tweets), Wikis, joint editing of documents and more, on one unified platform. With the help of the Content Dashboard [21] we visualized the structure of the content (intellectual entities and components) and calculated the metrics listed in Table 3. Figure 3 shows the applications, intellectual entities and components that were analyzed.…”