The online debate was based around a recent drama series by the BBC Two called the White Series. I caught one of the episodes called White Girl, which was pretty well written but criticised later for being overly stereotypical of muslim communities. The main premise of the series was the question 'Is white working class Britain becoming invisible?' sure to be a pretty contentious issue.
The interface for the online discussion itself was a little dissapointing using the BBC News site standard 'Have Your Say' funtionality with just a simple guestbook style interaction without option for comment or interaction within the site. The discussion had 7877 contributions with 1001 of these being rejected so sounds like a lively debate.
The interactive visual site using Spectrum provides a much richer visual insight into the debate. You can view the debate by emotional response where each major emotion group displays as a range of coloured bubbles as below from anger and fear to hope and happiness. From here you can see a snippet of the debate or click through to the full comment. It's a much more interactive and fun way to scan a discussion although it doesn't allow the depth of engagement with a topic that a threaded discussion has. You can also look at intensity of feeling, agreement level and a regional break down of responses (perhaps useful for local politicians...)
It is a pretty impressive little application that seems to use keywords to interpret and categorise data for visual display. Would be interested to know if it was developed inhouse or externally. Anyway a good way to engage people in online debates in general.
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