  We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous
text deliberation pertaining to a document: (1) visibility of relationships
between comments and the text they reference, between different comments, and
between group members and the document and discussion, and (2)
distinguishability of boundaries between contextually related and unrelated
text and comments and between individual authors of documents and comments.
Interfaces for document-centered discussion generally fail to fulfill one or
both of these goals as well as they could. We describe the design of the new
version of Deme, a Web-based platform for online deliberation, and argue that
it achieves the two goals better than other recent designs.
