Debategraph FAQ
What do I need to use Debategraph?
Debategraph is browser-based web-application, so there is nothing to download and install. All you need is a Windows, Macintosh or Linux computer with a modern web browser and a broadband connection.
The current fully supported browsers are: - Internet Explorer 6 & 7 (Windows only),
- Firefox 2 or later (Windows/ Mac/Linux)
- Safari 3 or later (Windows/Mac).
Note that client-scripting (JavaScript) must also be enabled—as it generally is by default on most computers.
Debategraph and Thoughtgraph?
Debategraph.org is the first public implementation of the underlying Debatemapper software developed by the Anglo-Australian social enterprise Thoughtgraph Ltd, and a signatory to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.
The debate processing software has been developed in public beta over the last year, via pilot projects in the UK for the Prime Minister's Office and the Royal Society of Arts, with a view to fulfilling the vision now embodied in Debategraph.
To help support Debategraph as a free, creative commons social venture, Thoughtgraph is also developing commercial applications of the Debatemapper software as a tool for internal collaborative knowledge sharing, argument mapping, and decision making within interested organisations. The Thoughtgraph team also works with senior management teams to map and communicate complex issues, decisions and strategic challenges to internal and external stakeholders.
Why Debategraph?
A controversial issue such as the debate about the future of Iraq will typically result in a vast quantity of debate material in the media, legislative bodies and academia. Much of this is highly partisan, with selective and often fallacious use of arguments and a tendency to ignore or deprecate anything that might favor contrary viewpoints. The multitude of debate contributions also exhibits a high degree of repetition and redundancy; making it harder to separate the signal from the noise.
What is lacking is a method for people to easily view and comprehend the debate as a totality, with different positions and arguments clearly juxtaposed in a consistent structure that reflects sound argumentation principles. Debategraph is designed to address this deficiency by allowing protagonists for different viewpoints to collaborate in developing comprehensive statements of debates.
In this way Debategraph promotes greater clarity in public debate by allowing people to properly appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of all the relevant viewpoints.
However, the name Debategraph reflects our aspiration to do more than provide a repository of debates about various topics on this site. We want to map not just individual debates, but the relationships between them—something that is crucial to gaining a full understanding of complex, interrelated real-world issues, and something that only truly becomes possible with the emergence of the latest generation of web technology.
As Debategraph grows and evolves, the knowledge that it embodies and codifies has the potential to contribute to the wider evolution of the web into a fully enabled semantic graph that not only connects computers and documents, as in the traditional web, but also utilises ideas, concepts and meaning as well.
Key features of the Debategraph?
Debategraph reflects our desire to get to grips with some key difficulties in modeling and understanding highly complex real-world debates. These include:
Multiple alternatives: Software applications used for debate/argument mapping often compel users to adopt a two-dimensional pro/con structure in which supportive and opposing cases relevant to some claim are marshaled. Debategraph recognizes that real-world policy debates are rarely that simple. As exemplified by the current debate over Iraq policy, a number of competing policies may need to be considered. Debategraph allows for the enumeration and ranking of such rival policies, with parts of argumentation structures relevant to more than one able to be ‘cloned’ in multiple locations.
Complex policies: Policy proposals deserving of serious consideration can rarely be reduced to a single proposition or measure. With respect to the Iraq debate for example, the proposal of the Iraq Study Group co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton contained 79 separate measures organized into groups concerned with military/security measures, regional initiatives, and so on. Typically, some of these specific measures will also be found in rival policies, perhaps in a variant form or with a different degree of emphasis in the overall package. For example, all of the comprehensive policy proposals, including that of the Bush administration, include some sort of effort to engage regional powers in a solution. Debategraph allows policy positions to be decomposed into their component parts, with some elements, or variations thereof, appearing in more than one of the rival policies.
Agent-specificity: Debategraph recognizes that consideration of policy alternatives needs to be agent-specific – that is, it must recognize that different actors have different ‘repertoires’ of possible measures, and also have different circumstances and interests. To take the Iraq example again, the government of the United States has a wider range of available measures than that of the UK – let alone that of smaller war participants such as Australia. On the other hand, some marginal or non-participants may have other options not available to the US – to act as ‘honest broker’ for example. Even within the US, different arms of government have different repertoires – the executive and the Congress have different available options to affect the course of events (in the case of the Congress, mainly a blocking or constraining role through control of budgetary allocations). Debategraph supports an approach wherein an issue can be framed separately for different actors, with different repertoires of possible policy options for each.
Structural features: Argumentation theorists have identified a number of basic constructs that may appear in a debate map (see for example James B. Freeman Dialectics and the Macrostructure of Arguments Foris 1991). These include linked structure (two or more co-premises working jointly to support a conclusion), convergent structure (two or more arguments independently adding weight to a conclusion), divergent structure (the case where a premise supports more than one conclusion) and serial structure (where the conclusion of one piece of argument is a premise for another, and so on so that an ultimate conclusion may be underpinned by an argument ‘tree’). Debategraph supports all these structures.
Map grammars: The basic building blocks of debate maps are items representing different argumentative constructs. Every map must conform to a ‘map grammar’ which specifies a vocabulary (or ontology) of item types, and a set of rules stipulating how they may be combined. Debategraph programmatically enforces these rules as users build and edit maps, automatically disallowing semantically nonsensical actions (such as adding a supportive premise to an issue or question, rather than a conclusion). The Debategraph ontology consists of a core of basic constructs common to debates irrespective of the subject matter. To this can be added additional modules relevant to particular domains – such as the module for public policy debates. The grammars also constrain how cross-links can be created within and between maps (see below for a description of cross-links).
Multiple expressions: Each item on a debate map can be expressed at three levels of detail: a heading text (a short heading to be displayed on a map outline); a concise expression (up to 250 characters in length) that is displayed in a contextual view (see below) and an expanded text which can include charts, images, videos and other media items and can be an essay of up to 50,000 characters in length (about 10,000 words). The latter provides a means, for example, whereby an editor can provide a detailed background article supporting some tersely expressed point displayed on the map itself. This is a particularly desirable facility for some of the features that may be represented on a map – for instance there is a construct for comparing scenarios that people claim will flow from a particular policy (e.g. the debate about what will happen if Coalition forces are withdrawn from Iraq.
Contextual views: In a large debate map, it is important for users to be able to focus on particular parts of the map. Debategraph addresses this need by providing several different contextual views of a map item, each showing the item in a differently defined context (for example, the immediate context may show the conclusion a premise supports directly, the premise itself, and any premises that show it). Other views show different parts of the surrounding argument ‘tree’. There is also a ‘details’ view which shows the heading, concise text, the expanded text (if any), relevant item metadata and any free-form user comments on the item displayed in a blog-style format.
Debate protagonists: In any major public debate there will be a multiplicity of people with a viewpoint and preparedness to express it. In addition a range of political parties, factions within parties, ideological tendencies, newspapers and other media outlets, or followers of one or other theory (e.g. the ‘realists’ in the international relations community) may be said to have a position or viewpoint. However a person involved in building a debate map may enter/edit positions or arguments with which he/she personally does not agree – hence the need to clearly distinguish the position of a map editor from that of an actual protagonist in the debate. Debategraph has a method of explicitly incorporating protagonists into the debate model with a nested structure so that a party or group can be broken into sub-groups down to the level of individuals. Users can render a view of a debate map with all items supported by a particular protagonist exploded and highlighted.
Articulations: In constructing a debate map, the ideal is to represent each item in the structure concisely, accurately and fairly (though with the option to add an extended article as the map item’s ‘expanded text’). Such expressions should be free of rhetorical devices designed to influence the reader over and above the inherent force of the argument. However to see how a particular argumentative point represented in a map has been articulated by a variety of advocates, editors may associate 'articulations' with the point in question. In entering an articulations, an editor may include a link to a URL, a set of metadata, and can copy and paste an excerpt of up to 10,000 words length to be stored in the database. All articulations can be viewed by in conjunction with a details view of the item in question. Articulations can also be evaluated by the user community, with the top-ranking ones pushed to the top in the exemplar display.
Semantic cross-links within and between maps: In most argument mapping applications, the map takes the form of an ‘argument tree’ in which a conclusion is supported by a tree-hierarchic serial arrangement of premises and conclusions. Debategraph also takes this approach, though with some important enhancements such as the support of argument cloning and divergent structure (see above). The latter means that a Debategraph map may take the form that specialists in the branch of mathematics called graph theory term a ‘multitree’
However Debategraph supports the addition to this of a range of semantic cross-links, subject to constraints imposed by the relevant map grammar (see above). Importantly, semantic cross-links can connect items in separate maps so that, for example, a principle deriving from moral philosophy or an international relations theory appearing in a general debate about how war might be justified may ‘ground’ an argument in a debate about a specific war (such as Iraq). Freed from the internal tree structure, this feature allows many-to-many relations in which a general principal enunciated in one map may ground many claims in other maps, and a claim may receive support from more than one principal. Grounding (which may represent a Toulmin warrant type relationship) is one of several kinds of semantic cross-link currently supported.
Evolving debate clusters: In our view, it is impossible to do justice to a debate like the current one about Iraq within the confines of a single debate map. This is because so many of the arguments and considerations invoked in the debate derive their force (or lack thereof) for different audiences from a complex background of beliefs, values and theories about how the world works held by audience members. One argumentation theorist has termed this background the audience member’s “epistemic state” (Mark Vorobej A Theory of Argument Cambridge 2006).
In some cases, such views may take the form of simple prejudices. In other cases, they may derive from heavily debated theories about how the world works, or should work. A constant background to the Iraq debate has been a more general argument between the ‘realists’ in the international relations community, with their skepticism about the prospects for externally-imposed regime change, and the neo-conservatives and supporters of the ‘democratic peace’ theory who argue maintain that a state’s external behavior is heavily determined by the nature of its internal regime. Such background debates shaped the specific argument about whether to intervene in Iraq – and unfolding events and the accumulation of experience in Iraq are, in turn, feeding back into the more general debates (see for example the treatment of the Iraq experience in the new book Ethical Realism by Anatol Levien and John Hulsman).
Debategraph aims to capture these facets by providing for different debates to be semantically interconnected, with users able to use such linkages to navigate around the entire repository of debate. We anticipate the emergence of clusters of related debates in which there is an ongoing interplay between arguments about general principles and ones about specific issues.
How is Debategraph implemented?
Debategraph is a multi-tiered web application that employs Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 server technology, an SQL Server 2005 relational database and client-side scripting to provide the relevant functionality. Once the user has initially downloaded the relevant application page, all interactions with the web and database servers take place by AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) callbacks. This provides a user experience not far removed from that of a desktop application. The application is designed to support very large debate maps and the creation of semantic linkages across individual map boundaries thereby creating a unified repository of debate in which relationships between as well as within debates can be expressed.