Experience Journals: A Web-based Tool for Sharing Stories
Researchers at MERL and Boston's Children's Hospital have  collaborated to produce an application that records, organizes, and displays stories. The stories are written by people who share problems or interests, such as coping with the illness of a loved one. Characteristics of these communities and their recorded experiences have led us to experiment with an initial algorithm toward the vision of a self-organizing, self-evolving, web-based system.   With support from the Noonan Fund, psychologists at Children's Hospital are conducting studies to ascertain the software's usability and its usefulness in helping people cope with illness.
Background & Objective: Often, chronically ill children and their families face illness and hospitalizations without intervention to ease emotional stresses. People who have experienced similar medical problems could offer support, but communication between such families is rare. We are investigating the use of networked computer technology to facilitate this process. With the EJ software, members of a medical community, or any group with common interests, can record text and multimedia vignettes that are made available for browsing at a secure World-Wide-Web site. Because informal communities typically cannot support an administrator to organize and monitor a rapidly growing Web site with large, distributed authorship, the algorithm automatically organizes and manages the entries. Ease of use is particularly important for such varied populations.
Technical Discussion: Our algorithm computes a word vector for each EJ entry by removing stop words (e.g., "the," "and," "is," etc.), stripping suffixes (e.g., "ly," "ing," etc.), and weighting the remaining word stems according to the inverse of their occurrence frequency in a large text corpus (i.e., rare words are weighted heavily, and common words discounted). The algorithm then calculates a similarity score for a pair of entries by taking the dot product of the two associated word vectors. We use the well-known technique of multidimensional scaling to position entry icons so that similar entries are near each other in the visual display, and dissimilar entries are far apart. Â Â Psychologists are conducting clinical trials in which Children's Hospital patients and their families use the software to record and share experiences of chronic illness. The researchers are combining observation, interviewing, questionnaire data, and analysis of EJ narratives in order to ascertain the system's therapeutic value and to provide developers with information for improving successive versions of the software.
Outside Collaborations: Contributors from the Department of Psychiatry, Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, include Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, David Ray DeMaso, Julie Dahlmeier Erickson, Kevin M. Brooks, Beth Donegan, Sarah Lualdi, and Judith Karlin. The Noonan Fund is supporting clinical trials of the software and study of trial results.
Contact: Joseph Katz
Technology Area: Net Services
Modification Date: September 12, 2007
