Dave, Kushal, Martin Wattenberg, and Michael Muller. "Flash forums and forumReader: navigating a new kind of large-scale online discussion." Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2004.

This paper introduces the concept of a "flash forum," a type of large, topic-centered, transient discussion found in various settings like web-based bulletin boards and corporate intranets. Flash forums differ from Usenet and other online discussions due to their more diffuse authorship and shallower, less distinct threads. To aid users in navigating these forums and finding areas of interest, the authors designed ForumReader, a tool that integrates data visualization with automatic topic extraction. Lessons learned from real-world deployment to thousands of users and a laboratory experiment indicate that while the ForumReader interface is well-liked and leads to new navigation patterns, combining visualization and text analytics may be counterproductive.