Ontological Foundations for Scholarly Debate Mapping Technology

Mapping scholarly debates is an important genre of what can be called Knowledge Domain Analytics (KDA) technology – i.e. technology which combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysing specialist knowledge domains. However, current KDA technology research has emerged from diverse traditions and thus lacks a common conceptual foundation. This paper reports on the design of a KDA ontology that aims to provide this foundation. The paper then describes the argumentation extensions to the ontology for supporting scholarly debate mapping as a special form of KDA and demonstrates its expressive capabilities using a case study debate

The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder\u27s The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces

I first saw Métis artist Terril Calder\u27s 2014 stop-frame feature, The Lodge, an independently made, relatively small- budget film, at its premiere at the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts festival, held annually in Toronto, Canada. The feature-length animation played to a full house at the Light-box Theater downtown. Many were there to attend the five-day festival, which is dedicated to Indigenous media made by and for Indigenous people. Others were there because as members of Toronto\u27s general public they wanted to catch a movie during a night out in the city. Since then The Lodge has shown at various other independent venues. It isn\u27t what you might think of as commercial fare. Its audiences are not huge. However, for those who do view The Lodge, the film presents a creative space to rethink our sense of boundaries in a number of ways: boundaries between human/nonhuman, white/Indigenous, male/female, spectator/film-object. In this essay, I argue that the film is thus an invitation to question the naturalness of hegemonic identity assumptions that demarcate such boundaries. I interviewed Calder (via Skype and subsequent email correspondence) soon after I saw the film, and I situate a close textual analysis of the film within the context of her intent and the burgeoning scholarly dialogue between Indigenous studies and ecocritical studies. The scholarly dialogue, as Joni Adamson and I write in the introduction to our recent anthology, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2016), argues for clear sighted understandings of multi-faceted human/more-than-human relationships that exist outside of binaries imposed by Western notions of progress . Similarly, Steven Loft, coeditor of Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, writes of an Indigenous media cosmology that is replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things and that is not predicated on Western foundations of thought (xvi). Calder extends such Indigenous worldviews of connectedness to cinema and animation in particular

Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology

Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) research investigates computational support for users who desire to understand and/or participate in the scholarly inquiry of a given academic knowledge domain. KDA technology supports this task by allowing users to identify important features of the knowledge domain such as the predominant research topics, the experts in the domain, and the most influential researchers. This thesis develops the conceptual foundations to integrate two identifiable strands of KDA research: Library and Information Science (LIS), which commits to a citation-based Bibliometrics paradigm, and Knowledge Engineering (KE), which adopts an ontology-based Conceptual Modelling paradigm. A key limitation of work to date is its inability to provide machine-readable models of the debate in academic knowledge domains. This thesis argues that KDA tools should support users in understanding the features of scholarly debate as a prerequisite for engaging with their chosen domain. To this end, the thesis proposes a Scholarly Debate Ontology which specifies the formal vocabulary for constructing representations of debate in academic knowledge domains. The thesis also proposes an analytical approach that is used to automatically detect clusters of viewpoints as particularly important features of scholarly debate. This approach combines aspects of both the Conceptual Modelling and Bibliometrics paradigms. That is, the method combines an ontological focus on semantics and a graph-theoretical focus on structure in order to identify and reveal new insights about viewpoint-clusters in a given knowledge domain. This combined ontological and graph-theoretical approach is demonstrated and evaluated by modelling and analysing debates in two domains. The thesis reflects on the strengths and limitations of this approach, and considers the directions which this work opens up for future research into KDA technology

Methodological bricolage: What does it tell us about design?

This paper explores an approach to design research that is becoming more prevalent in practice-based doctoral studies and examines what it tells us about the current state of design research. A previous examination of design PhD case studies has shown that the bricolage approach is evident in a majority of contemporary practice-based design PhDs [1]. The usual academic norm of using an established method or methodology is often discarded in favour of a ‘pick and mix’ approach to select and apply the most appropriate methods. Does it suggest a discipline in crisis, where existing methods are unfit for purpose? Or does this suggest that design as a discipline is maturing and developing a distinct research model? Is design undisciplined? The paper answers these questions by proposing that design researchers navigate a complex, indeterminate and temporal framework where the bricoleur is the best operative

Spatial theory and method for the study of religion

From an examination of recent social and cultural theory and selected work on place and space by scholars of religion I draw together resources for the development of a spatial methodology for the study of religion. In order to identify the key elements of this methodology, I discuss relations between the body and space, the dimensions, properties and aspects of space, and its dynamics, including the mutual imbrication of space, the “sacred” and sacralization. Consideration is given briefly to the application of a spatial approach, its strengths and weaknesses

Critical thinking and systems thinking: towards a critical literacy for systems thinking in practice

About the book: In reflective problem solving and thoughtful decision making using critical thinking one considers evidence, the context of judgment, the relevant criteria for making the judgment well, the applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment, and the applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand. In this book, the authors present topical research in the study of critical thinking. Topics discussed include developing critical thinking through probability models; the promotion of critical thinking skills through argument mapping; an instructional model for teacher training in critical thinking; advanced academic literacy and critical thinking and critical thinking and higher education

Researching Ethics and Morality in Information Systems: Some Guiding Questions

Research on ethical and moral issues in information systems is increasingly recognized as legitimate and important. It raises a number of problems, however, that are often difficult for IS scholars to recognize and address. This paper therefore aims to provide guidance for IS scholars interested in undertaking or evaluating ethics-related research. The guidance is given in the form of questions that should be considered in order to avoid unnecessary mistakes and duplication of efforts. The questions presented cover the concept of ethics, the level of normative engagement, the relationship to prior work within IS and adjacent disciplines, the consistency of different aspects of ethics and the justification of normative conclusions. For each question the central issues under debate are elaborated and then the relevance of the question for IS research is discussed. The set of questions provides a guiding framework that will contribute to the improvement of the quality of ethics-related research in IS

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

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An ontological approach to the study of European popular culture

Like any other field of contemporary scholarly research, the Humanities in general, and Cultural Studies in particular are today confronted with the challenges of complexity at an unprecedented scale. What has been described as the \u201castonishing growth\u201d of academic publications worldwide is paralleled by a similar proliferation of browsable online databases, like digital archives, collections and catalogues, which offer access to an immense and continuously increasing volume of virtually interesting research material, stored in the form of information bytes. As we discussed in Deliverable 2.1, \u201cSorting out the archive for the study of European popular culture\u201d, the problem of how to cope with such an unseizable of virtually relevant sources of evidence is all the more sensible in the case of a project like DETECt, which deals with one of the most prolific narrative genres of contemporary media production, that is, the European crime narrative genre. Not only an exhaustive catalogue of this production could easily count\u2014especially when considered in all of its transnational scope\u2014in thousands of thousands, and even\u2014in historical perspective\u2014millions of items, but the transdisciplinary scope of the studies it has inspired has produced a wealth of research in many domains of knowledge. These difficult challenges make DETECt an ideal laboratory for experimenting new methods to manage complexity in a transnational/transcultural research environment. This methodological experimentation aims to respond to the problem of how to generate effective syntheses of portions and/or aspects of a given knowledge domain in a context of information overload. To this purpose, the ontological approach chosen by DETECt focuses on the application of knowledge mapping techniques to encourage the formulation of partial knowledge syntheses within a \u201crealist\u201d, and even \u201cpragmatic\u201d theoretical framework