Simon Buckingham Shum is visiting the group today and giving a seminar this afternoon:
TITLE: Hypermedia Discourse: Contesting Networks of Ideas and Arguments Face-to-Face and on the Net
ABSTRACT: Why can’t you Google for: “inconsistent ideas” or “metaphors/analogies”? What kind of video player can skip to “the next argument in this meeting”? In this talk I will provide the rationale for, and demonstrations of, Hypermedia Discourse tools, an approach to reading, writing and contesting ideas as hypermedia networks grounded in discourse schemes. The objective is to design usable, interactive discourse representations that are both cognitively and computationally tractable: fluid enough to serve as augmentations to group working memory, yet structured enough to support long term memory. I will describe how such networks can be (i) mapped by multiple analysts to visualize and interrogate the claims and arguments in a literature, and (ii) mapped by a facilitator in real time to manage a team’s information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and decisions, particularly in time-pressured scenarios where harnessing collective intelligence is a priority. I will suggest that given the current geo-political climate, the increasingly distributed, networked nature of work, and the need for trans-disciplinary discourse for wicked problems, there has never been greater need for sensemaking tools to help diverse stakeholders build common ground.
BIO: Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer at the UK Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. He has worked on the usability and utility of hypertext for mapping meetings and argumentation since his doctoral work on design rationale argumentation in 1990 (Rank Xerox EuroPARC and Univ. York HCI Group). He co-edited “Visualizing Argumentation” (2003), which brings together for the first time the leading practitioners and researchers in argument mapping, and “Knowledge Cartography” (2007, in prep.) will update and broaden this. He is PI/Co-PI on several e-science/social science projects, and is a co-founder of the Compendium Institute whose hypertext tool supports collaborative modelling and sensemaking.
Simon has made his presentation slides available, and discusses the idea at the KMi blog.
