Category: Papers & Talks

e-Democracy debate: 12 years on…

Great to see Tony Hirst dismembering the Digital Britain Interim report and  reassembling it on the WordPress-powered  WriteToReply blog, supporting paragraph-specific comments from the public whom the report wishes to consult.

But wait a minute… <swirly timewarp venetian blind transition*> 1997, The Dearing Report is published on the Future Of Higher Education, and… we dismember and reassemble it to enable paragraph-specific comments from the public whom the report wishes to consult.   * hey, it’s Friday evening!

This time though, instead of a nice Web 2.0 tool downloaded for free and hosted in the cloud, we’ve employed a programmer for 6 months to write a Java desktop toolkit to process an HTML document in order to generate a frames-heavy document discussion environment called D3E [sourceforge / screencasts] which hypertextualises the Dearing Report, generating an automated contents list, bibliographic reference links, and a comment icon inserted next to each new heading and paragraph, which links to the corresponding thread in a customised HyperNews forum. I even managed to Google a screenshot of it, since I lost all mine. I love ‘old’ web screenshots: they speak volumes about their era.

D3E-ized 1997 Dearing Report on Higher Education, enabling document-centric discussion.
D3E-ized 1997 Dearing Report on Higher Education, enabling document-centric discussion.
Discussion on a specific section of the report
Discussion on a specific section of the report

Now, the interesting thing of course is to ask, what’s new, and what’s not?

  • On the technical front, attaching interactive commentaries to sections in a document no longer feels groundbreaking. It kinda did in the mid-90s. It’s now nice and easy to set up, and possibly easier to use. Good stuff. And of course, there are feeds coming off it, and Tony cunningly used Twitter to raise enough interest to rapidly get mainstream media coverage. Not possible in 97. Our Hypertext Godfathers have left their legacy. Engelbart’s paragraph-level link referencing is used in both systems, but Nelson’s transclusions have only found everyday reality with Web 2.0 feeds and embed code, enabling WriteToReply contributions to tunnel through the net to myriad unknown sites.
  • On the political front, we have to ask will it make a difference? For the Dearing exercise, we had Diana Laurillard, a member of the National Inquiry into the Future of HE and a senior person at the OU, who could take the online contributions and feed them into its deliberations. WriteToReply’s Open Letter to Lord Carter and the ‘Digital Britain – Interim Report’ Team is one way to raise the stakes, and increase the motivation of the public to contribute via this channel. And that is surely the societal dimension to e-Democracy tools such as this. The scare commodity is attention, so what  decides whether one channel will receive the eyes on it that are required to give it authority?

In 1997, I was reflecting on D3E, and trying to conceive what came next. How should we evolve from what was essentially the chunking of a traditional document into hypertextual pieces with traditional threaded commentary hanging of them, into… whatever should come next? Drawing on the foundational work of the hypertext research community into graphical ‘browser-based hypermedia’, such as PARC’s NoteCards and MCC’s gIBIS, I became convinced that the future was to layer semantic webs of interpretation over the vanilla Web, and to be able to filter and visualize them in order to see the conceptual structure of the ideas and arguments that conventional prose hides.Why can’t the platform tell me something about the logical structure of this debate, not just show me chronologically structured postings?

That evolved into our Hypermedia Discourse tools like Compendium, ClaiMaker, ClaimSpotter and now Cohere. These feel like the wall scatchings of cavemen, struggling to give birth to a new medium and literacy — but in 12 years’ time…

Meantime, all power to you Tony. I hope that we may now be in an era where the crowd really can, through intelligent swarming, build not only critical mass but critical comment with tools such as this. And yes, let’s try and figure out what you get when you mix WriteToReply with Cohere and simmer for 30mins 😉

Dancing on the Grid: new article

After reporting the first year of the AHRC/EPSRC/JISC e-Dance project’s work in Edinburgh at the 2008 e-Science All Hands Meeting, we’ve updated this in a new article:

Bailey, H., Bachler, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Le Blanc, A., Popat, S., Rowley, A. and Turner, M. (2009). Dancing on the Grid: Using e-Science Tools to Extend Choreographic Research. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 13 July 2009, Vol. 367, No. 1898, pp. 2793-2806. [PDF]

This paper considers the role and impact of new and emerging e-Science tools on practice-led research in dance. Specifically it draws on findings from the e-Dance project. This two-year project brings together an interdisciplinary team combining research aspects of choreography, next generation of video conferencing, and Human-Computer Interaction analysis incorporating hypermedia and non-linear annotations for recording and documentation.

Keywords: Access Grid, Choreography, Dance, e-Science, Hypertext, Knowledge Cartography, Networked Performance

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Book: Cartografia Cognitiva published

Knowledge Mapping Research Fellow Ale Okada has been rather prolific this year. Not only has she managed much of the editorial process for Knowledge Cartography, she has also been reaching out to the Portuguese speaking world with her other new book Cartografia Cognitiva.

This has been launched at numerous conferences around her home country of Brazil, as well as at the recent Third International Conference on Concept Mapping.

With a Foreword from concept mapping pioneer Joe Novak, this is a great contribution, particularly in a literature that is English language dominated.

Evidence-Based Dialogue Mapping for Teenagers

KMi’s Compendium tool supports rapid visual mapping of dialogues and debates through a mix of visual language, tagging and hypermedia structuring. With a track record of use in the workplace, we are now beginning to build evidence of its potential for critical thinking in schools.

With >40,000 downloads and an annual workshop, KMi supports an active Compendium user community (and a growing developer group). It has found application primarily, although not exclusively, in the workplace, the tool of choice for many information analysts and facilitators of collective sensemaking. But could we demonstrate that younger users would embrace its visual language and the extra rigour of thinking that argument mapping requires?

In an exciting workshop led by Ale Okada, a Research Fellow in the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, teenagers judged by their schools to be “gifted and talented” attended a science summer school, and were taught how to map and structure their reasoning about the impact of climate change on the UK. The results are summarised in a new article, and represent the first step in our programme to introduce the next generation to visual, network-centric thinking, a literacy that we think will become increasingly important.

Okada, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a Research Tool to Investigate the Quality of School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation, International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 31(3), pp. 291–315 (Special Issue: Coffin, C. and O’Halloran, K.A, (Eds.) Researching Argumentation in Educational Contexts: New Methods, New Directions). Article PrePrint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/11773

Digital Scholarly Discourse

I wrote this recently as a 1-pager to a foundation, which more or less sums up how I’m thinking right now…

Digital Scholarly Discourse

It is premature to applaud the Internet as the next Gutenberg revolution until it similarly transforms our core assumptions about how knowledge can be most effectively disseminated, analysed and debated.

In the shadow of the print journal

1665 was a milestone in the history of intellectual technology. Within months of each other, the French and British academies published Le Journal des S

Formalizing Philosophical Narratives for e-Learning

It’s always exciting when one strand of work collides with your own, and from this fusion, interesting new particles emerge. In this case, Mikele Pasin, a PhD student in KMi with Enrico Motta on modelling the literature around Wittgenstein using a semantic web approach (to create the PhiloSURFical prototype), then joined the Cohere team, and got interested in modelling discourse and argumentation structures.

The result was a paper which went down very well at the European Computing and Philosophy Conference last month, and demonstrates the hybrid collision of a Semantic Web perspective modelling consensus knowledge, and our take on the Pragmatic Web which revolves around modelling potentially contested intepretations. Nice work Mikele 🙂

Pasin, M., Buckingham Shum, S., & Motta, E. (2008). Formalizing

Compendium “makes sense” in Florence (CHI 2008)

Al Selvin and I are in Florence, participating in the Sensemaking workshop at the CHI 2008 (Computer-Human Interaction) conference, the main conference in human-centred computing.

“Sensemaking” has long been a core concept at the heart of our work, drawing on the foundational work of people like Karl Weick and Brenda Dervin. This workshop is possibly the largest recently on the theme, and all agreed at the end of today that there seems to be critical mass to take things forward.

Here are the Dialogue Map notes I took, and all the papers are on the workshop website. Our paper was:

Selvin, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Narrative, Sensemaking, and Improvisation in Participatory Hypermedia Construction. Sensemaking Workshop, ACM CHI 2008: Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, Florence, April 6, 2008. [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hyperdiscourse/docs/Selvin-CHI2008.pdf]

In this paper we describe research into a form of practitioner sensemaking in the context of participatory hypermedia construction sessions, in which groups of people build knowledge maps. We discuss how constructs from narrative theory and improvisation have helped us understand what happens at the moments when practitioners encounter dilemmas and obstacles. We provide brief examples from case studies and discuss possible contributions to broader themes in sensemaking research.

To know more of this work, check out Al Selvin’s work on Knowledge Art & Participatory Hypermedia Construction

Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation

The first paper on Cohere, our Web 2.0 knowledge and argument mapping application, has been accepted for presentation to the main forum for researchers working at the intersection of computing and argument. See you in Toulouse in May!

Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation. Proc. COMMA’08: 2nd International Conference on Computational Models of Argument, 28-30 May 2008, Toulouse. IOS Press: Amsterdam [http://oro.open.ac.uk/10421/]

Abstract:

Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams. Central to this work is the process of sharing—and contesting—interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the “Web 2.0” paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization.

(PS: and here are the slides from the day…)

From Aristotle to Gabriel: Narratology for Story Technologists

Just published is this report from the Storymaking Project by KMi student Joanna Kwiat:

Kwiat, J. (2008). From Aristotle to Gabriel: A Summary of the Narratology Literature for Story Technologies. Technical Report KMI-08-01, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. Available at: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-08-01.pdf

Anyone working on story technologies or annotation will find this of interest. Details below.

Abstract:

This purpose of this report is to provide a practical guide for story technologists. The report is organised in two parts. In the first part we explore, more or less chronologically, past and contemporary story models and in the second part we look at more recent theories and implementations examined in a story-making context.

In recent years there has been resurgence of interest in the both the medium and message of the story. However, we shall confine our discussion to structural theories and models because we assume firstly, that the main concerns for the story technologist are: story generation, annotation and organisation; secondly, we also want to offer the interested reader, a basic introduction to the still emerging discipline of narratology.

One reason for concentrating in Part 1 on past and contemporary story models is that it provides us with a vocabulary just in order to discuss this most familiar form of human communication; secondly it will help us identify whether and how originating theories have influenced those that are more applied which we shall discuss in Part 2.

In order to confine the search, we tend in Part 1 to disregard more abstract models and to concentrate solely on originating theories but which are described in concrete structural terms. Thus we are able to identify three broad research domains: literature, culture and cognition, each of which can be subdivided into three phases of development. Starting with the Aristotelian argument that the story to be appreciated as such, must meet certain structural criteria we follow an almost inevitable path from what we call the grammatical models to a period when the story was regarded as having a structure that could be paralleled to the linguistic structure of the sentence and, moreover, could be generated from a similar rule set. A powerful counter argument was that perfect syntax does not guarantee a story product and that matters of discourse are just as important to consider. Beyond the story grammars, there is a very active period and a diversity of theories but one thing most of them have in common is that the plot, no longer regarded as paramount, gives way to such things as narrator motive and audience response. We have in our own research used these more sophisticated models to identify and lift out stories from general online discussion threads; in addition they are informing our design and development of markup schemas for digital storybases.

Whereas Part 1 follows the rise and development of narratology, Part 2 brings our review of the literature up-to-date. Here, however, we are less concerned with the origin of ideas and more concerned with how they have informed contemporary applications. The concept of story-making offered by Harvey and Martin (1995) allows us to examine these later models from four perspectives: construction, recall, understanding and telling. We use these four perspectives as a basis for making judgements about which models are principally oriented towards, address or succeed in each of these areas.

CONTACT: Jkwiat {at} northamptonshire.gov.uk

TAL Special Issue: Discours et document : traitements automatiques

A special issue of the leading Anglo/French journal Traitement Automatique des Langues has just been published, co-edited by Prof. Donia Scott (OU Computing), and including a paper reporting an experiment from Clara Mancini’s doctoral thesis “Cinematic Hypertext”.

The special issue editorial surveys the convergence of discourse and NLP for document-processing:

This introduction tracks the evolution of the definition and role of discourse issues in NLP from the knowledge-intensive “discourse understanding” methods of the 80’s to the recent concern with “accessing contents” in vast document bases via data-intensive methods. As text/discourse linguistics moves toward corpus approaches, also in connection with the development of large text bases and of computational instruments, we explore potential new forms of convergence.

Clara’s paper, co-authored with Donia and myself is entitled: “Visualising discourse coherence in non-linear documents”:

To produce coherent linear documents, natural language generation systems have traditionally exploited the structuring role of textual discourse markers such as relational and referential phrases. These coherence markers of the traditional notion of text, however, do not work in non-linear documents: a new set of graphical devices is needed together with formation rules to govern their usage, supported by sound theoretical frameworks. If in linear documents graphical devices such as layout and formatting complement textual devices in the expression of discourse coherence, in non-linear documents they play a more important role. In this paper, we present our theoretical and empirical work in progress, which explores new possibilities for expressing coherence in the generation of hypertext documents.

Related Links:
TAL Special Issue: Discours et document : traitements automatiques
Visualising discourse coherence in non-linear documents