Pollite Lens - Help for each page

This document contains a short piece of help for each page in the Pollite Lens, with links into the other user documentation.

If you read all the sections in this document, then you will know about each feature of the software !

Create Account

This page allows you to create a new lens account. You must submit a "Login Name" and email address.

Your initial password is sent to you at your email address. This procedure verifies that the email address exists and was typed in properly. Your user name is not included in this email. You must remember The "user name" must be unique. After logging in with your initial password, you can change it using the change password function.

Change Password

This screen prompts you to enter your old and new passwords. About Passwords and Security

This is the form you use when you start a session on the lens.

About Login Sessions

Enter the user name you chose when you created your account, and your password.

If you are already logged in on another computer, or in another window, that login session will be terminated.

Logout

Once you click the "Logout" menu link, you can no longer enter new information into the Lens. You should still exit from your browser before walking away from your computer, because someone else could possibly read your password from the browser cache.

About Login Sessions

Publish

The publish screens allow you to post "claim documents" in the Lens.

You must be logged in to access this screen.

You must first decide whether you want to type in the title and text of the claim (which is easier for beginners), or send a file that you have already created on your computer (which is more powerful but also more difficult).

To make this decision, you must click on one of the two links on the Publish page. These links will take you to a form where you can enter the claim.

If you click on "Type a claim interactively", you will go to the Publish Typed screen.

If you click on "Upload a claim from an HTML file on your computer", you will go to the Publish File screen.

About Claims

Different ways to publish a claim

Publish File

This screen is used to send a claim to the lens, using an HTML file that you have composed and saved on your hard drive. You can use any HTML editor to do this, however, the Lens imposes several rerestrictions on the contents of the file you send. Basically, you can send any HTML formatting, including tables, but you cannot use embedded scripts or applets.

For more information, see How to Upload a Claim File

Rules regarding claim submission

About submitting HTML claims

Publish Typed

This is the screen you use to interactively type claim documents The publish screens allow you to post "claim documents" in the Lens

Cite Vote and Reasons

This page allows you to respond to a claim, by creating (or adding to) a position.

Before continuing, you should really read this section : About Claim Responses

You should also understand the difference between proposals and surveys .

Now, this page allows you to place a single vote, and one or more reasons, into your position.

The first thing you must do is select a vote. You can do this by selecting from the list of votes provided. If you are voting on a proposal, this list will always contain only four items: "AGREE", "DISAGREE", "REVISE", "COMMENT".

If you are voting on a survey, then the list will contain only those votes that others have already entered into their positions. If you are the first voter on a survey (who is usually the author), then the list will be empty. However, there is a text box provided into which you can enter your vote, which will be converted to all upper case letters.

The next thing you must do is select one or more reasons. Any claim (except of course the issue claim you are voting on) can be used as a reason for your vote. However, in order to give you a list to choose from, the Lens must make a guess about what claims you might need to use as a reason. To do this, it makes a list of the following claims:

All the claims you have visited since logging in
All the claims you have authored
All the claims you have previously cited as a reason

(1) refers to claims that you have looked at the summary page for since logging in. So if you want to use a claim as a reason, first go visit it by using the search page , and then come back to this page (and, you must "reload" the page if you are using the browser "back" button). Then you should see the visited title appear in the list of potential reasons.

You can see (2) and (3) by looking at Your Platform

Of course, when you are a new user, this page is somewhat confusing, because you have not yet authored or cited any claims, so you will only see visited claims, and these are remembered by the Lens only for as long as you are logged in. This is admittedly a very cumbersome interface and could be improved in a variety of ways. We are working on it, and your suggestions are welcome.

Toggle Support

This page allows you to "toggle" your support for a particular vote and reason. If you do not already have this vote and reason in your position, you will be asked to confirm that you want to add them. Otherwise, you will be asked to confirm that you want to delete this vote and reason from your position.

If you confirm the operation, you will be shown how your position looks after the operation is complete. You can remove support for more votes/reasons by selecting the links in the "You support" column.

Delete Position

This page allows you to delete your entire position on the issue claim. Your position is shown in the same way as on the Position Detail screen.

At the bottom of the page is a "DELETE" button that will delete ALL of your position (all the votes and reasons).

After you can do this, you are free to cite votes and reasons on this claim, thereby creating a new position.

Search Claims

There are three different ways you can search for claims to look at. These are shown as three separate forms on the search claims page. You can fill out ONE of these forms on each search that you do.

1) Searching by Keyword

The first form allows you to type in some "keywords" related to topics you are interested in. This is like using any web search engine you are familiar with, like "yahoo" or "hotbot". The more specific the set of terms you provide, the more focused the result set you will get.

For example, you might type in "nixon watergate congress hearing" to try to find claims related to the Watergate hearings in the U.S. congress.

2) Listing all claims

The second way to search for claims is to look through the list of all claims stored in the lens, in a variety of orders. Here are the three orders you can currently use: Most Recent Claims - These are the ones that have been published (but not necessarily voted on) most recently. Most Argued Claims - These are the claims that the most people have taken positions on (i.e. voted on). Most Cited - These are the claims that the most people have cited as a reason for voting on some other claim.

You can set the size of the page of claims that is displayed each time. A smaller page means faster downloads !

3) Lookup by claim ID

The third and final way to find claims is by noting their "Claim ID", which is shown in the summary at the top of any claim page. You can enter this ID into the text box to jump directly to the claim. Claim ID's do not change, so if you cannot find a claim this way it is because the claim has been deleted for some administrative purpose.

You can also use browser bookmarks to remember the claims you are interested in. Finally, remember that all claims you have authored or taken a position on can be seen in the Your Platform screen.

About "Bookmarks" and Claim IDs

Claim Text and Voting Summary

This page is the "home" page for a claim. Other pages, (such as the search page which show links to claims, are showing links to this page.

This page shows the summary of the claim at the top, together with some links to more voting details about the claim, and some voting actions you can take.

Below these outlined boxes is a single a box with a white background containing the text of the claim as entered by the author.

Below the text box is a voting summary, in the form of a list of coalitions.

About votes and coalitions

Each coalition includes a "vote" word, which is also a link to the Coalition Detail page for that vote.

If you want to quickly see a list of ALL the votes and reasons

You can use the links in the "View" box at the top of the page to navigate to different presentations of the ?????

Coalition Detail

This screen shows a detailed description of the support for a particular vote on the context claim.

The table shows you all of the reasons that users have cited for this vote.

The row for each reason includes statistics showing how many people cite that reason. It also includes a link to the claim cited as a reason. Finally, it contains a link to the reason detail page for this reason.

Reason Detail

This screen shows the details of support for a particular reason for a vote.

First it lists the statistics of support, showing how much "weighted" and "absolute" support there is for the (citation of the) reason. These stats also show whether or not you cite this reason (if you are logged in), and whether or not the author of the claim supports this reason.

Next is a list of all the positions that cite this reason.

This is basically a list of all the people who agree with this reason for voting a certain way.

In each row of the list is a link to the position detail screen. This link gives you a way to see the other votes and reasons that a particular person has cited in her position.

In each row of the list there is also a link to the platform summary screen. This gives you a way to see all the other stored opinions of the person holding this position.

All Votes and Reasons

This screen shows ALL the votes and reasons that have been entered for this claim.

The votes with the largest weighted support are shown at the top of the list.

Each row in the list of vote/reasons has a link to both the coalition detail and the reason detail for that vote/reason.

All Citations

This screen is frequently a source of confusion. When you understand what this screen is saying, you have become a LensMistress (Maestra de Lens).

The claim described in the "Summary" above is the same one you were browsing on your previous page. This claim is called the "Context Claim".

The table on this screen looks almost the same as the ones on the "Coalition Detail" screen. But this table shows, are you ready, an inverted view of the same many-to-many relationship between claims (strictly, between "Coalitions" and the claims cited in support of these coalitions).

This means that the columns in this table have a meaning that is inverted from the meaning they have in all the other tables of coalitions, reasons, etc.

That is, this screen shows every "citation" of the context claim. A citation is when someone responding to another claim, called the "issue claim", chooses the context claim as a reason for voting one way or another. This word is chosen to correspond to the legal idea of "citing" precedent case law. This may seem very complicated, but it is also a very important feature to understand. Using this this kind of navigation allows you to see the "consequences" of a particular claim. You can see every time that someone felt that this claim was evidentiary or otherwise significant in supporting a position on another issue. This can be the one of the most interesting aspects of using the Lens.

The citation table looks is similar to the "All Votes/Reasons" screen, except that here the fields describe the "issue" claim. So in this sense, the table is really more like one of the claim query tables (e.g. "Search Claims", "List Claims").

It is important not to become confused and start thinking that this table is like the others containing reasons reacting to the context claim. That is why this table should use a different color scheme (working on it !).

Position Detail

This page allows you to examine in detail the position of one person on an issue claim.

This page shows you each vote and reason that the person currently cites. These ????

This page is similar in format to the All votes and reasons page.

Each of these reasons receives equal weight in the computation of statistics. So (assuming the position is on a survey from the 1992 election), if a person has voted:

CLINTON - "Clinton is slick"
CLINTON - "Clinton is smart"
PEROT - "Perot is right"
BUSH - "Bush is tough"

Then:

Each of the 4 reasons gets 25% of the position's weight.
The CLINTON coalition gets 50% of the position's weight, and
the PEROT and BUSH coalitions each get 25%.

All Positions

This page shows a list of all the positions on the issue you are examining.

This allows you to assess the diversity and complexity of opinions people have responded with. Do many people cite more than one reason ? More than one vote ?

You can go to the Position Detail screen for any of the positions listed by selecting the "detail" link.

Platform Summary

This page summarizes the "platform" of a particular user (possibly you!). It will show your platform if you are logged in and you click the "Your Platform" menu link.

The summary contains 3 tables of information.

The first table shows all the claims that the user has published. The format of this table is the same as the one used in other screens showing a list of claims.

The second table shows all the claims that the user has taken a position on. The first column of this list shows the votes that this user entered in response to the claim.

The third table shows all the claims the user has cited as a reason for a vote on some other claim.