Sensemaking Tool for Understanding Research Literature

 

Project description

Tools have been developed to support ‘sensemaking’ of related articles. These tools can assist readers in interpreting relationships between ideas within a paper or between a number of papers, e.g. in extracting and comparing claims, etc in a single paper or between papers.

A recent tool is COHERE (http://cohere.open.ac.uk/), developed by the Knowledge Media Institute, UK and based on ClaiMaker, a web-based system for individuals to publish and contest ideas and arguments. It provides tools for constructing argument maps and a server on which they can then be published, navigated, filtered and visualized (Mancini et al., 2006; Uren et al., 2006).

Aim

The purpose of the thesis project is

  1. to model a set of related articles on the domain of empirical literature on the usefulness of animation
  2. to evaluate the constraints of the current COHERE system
  3. to evaluate the effectiveness of the network representation of the modeled set of articles, provided by COHERE, on understanding the critical relationships between represented ideas.

This thesis project is connected to an on-going CKE project in collaboration with Elsevier (drs. Anita de Waard), the “Structure of the Scientific Article” project.

Requirements

Sufficient knowledge of XML (UWL), interest in discourse comprehension

Starting date

As soon as possible (from April 2008)

In/extern

Intern

Contact/Supervision

Dr. Herre van Oostendorp (herre@cs.uu.nl, CKE), drs.Anita de Waard (anita@cs.uu.nl, Elsevier/CKE), and dr. Pieter Wouters (Pieterw@cs.uu.nl, CKE)

References

De Waard, A. (2007). A pragmatic structure for the research article. In Proceedings ICPW’07, 22-23 oct 2007.

Mancini, C., & Buckingham Shum, S.J. (2006). Modelling discourse in contested domains: A semiotic and cognitive framework. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64, 1154-1171.

Uren, V., Buckingham Shum, S., Bachler, M. & Li, G. (2006). Sensemaking tools for understanding research literatures: Design, implementation and user evaluation. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64, 420-445

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