I would recommend that we try to create our own debate-mapping tool. It might end up being surprisingly easy.

I've already used PHP, GraphViz, and MediaWiki to implement a vaguely similar project, the Transhumanist Wiki Scenarios Map.

Unfortunately, that project ended up being less useful than I had hoped, and has been abandoned for now.

Today, I made a rough sketch of what a debate-mapping tool based on these tools might look like.

A VERY rough sketch.

Pretty much every detail is probably going to need to be changed in order for it to be useable.

Anyway, here's a link to that experiment

Once again, It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.

The basic idea is that you take a chat log of a debate, and add some annotations, marking which are the main claims of the argument, and indicating which arguments support or oppose which other arguments.

Then, run a script on this annotated chat log, and it will output a graph of the arguments in the debate.

One advantage of this method is that the text and the annotations can be updated as the debate continues, and the graph will be updated to match this new data.

Some ideas for things to change:

change the formatting of the annotations. the word "claim" is unnecessary

set up the actual PHP script. These example graphs were generated by manually formatting the annotations in the graphviz format.

set up different formats for the output. A graph is not the most useful format. A better idea would be a table summarizing the info for each of the claims:

• the text of the claim
• a list of supporting claims (preferably with clickable links)
• a list of opposing claims
• a list of claims that this claim supports
• a list of claims that this claim opposes
• a list of who agrees with this claim
• the results of any of the other calculations that were performed on this graph. Maybe something with probabilities?
• more?

perhaps each claim could have its own wiki page, similar to how the scenarios map works

add more keywords, besides just "supports" and "opposes". Some examples are:

• relies on
• is an example of
• is a counterexample to
• assumption
• more?

add a way to indicate which speaker agrees with which claims, and deduce from that which conclusions are supported by implications of their assumptions

set up the script to automatically generate the graphs as the wiki page is updated

more?