literature_review

toc

A literature review
This page http://tagunity.wikispaces.com/literature_review

This research reviews the overlaps in the literature regarding social knowledge sharing, communities of practice (CoPs) theory, and content classification in online computer databases, sometimes known as Web content management systems (CMS). My analysis of the literature distinguishes three points of view from which ‘community’ or social connection is seen to be developed in online applications. In the first view, it is argued that an online environment or database application should be owned and maintained by the community of volunteers who contribute the content. In the second view, it is argued, that content structures and content classification should be formal and centrally managed, for example by an expert cataloguer, taxonomist or ontology engineer (an ontology is an explicit formal representation of a body of knowledge). Finally, the third view is that classification can be dynamic, that is informal, decentralised, incremental and emergent. Such informal structures are sometimes called folksonomies – shared vocabularies that emerge in an online environment, where users independently assign their own categories; consensus is not required. The connection between the views outlined is that people who share a common practice also often have a shared and quite specific understanding of the language they use (e.g. Cuel, Bouquet, & Bonifacio, 2006).

My aim is to explore the relationship between language, local practice and the classification of content in online databases. I pay particular attention to the overlaps and connections between the three views outlined. I consider the rationale for research at the intersection of all three, in particular the reasons to apply CoPs theory (and other practice based theories such as activity theory and actor-network theory) to the study of the social processes in database enabled environments on the World Wide Web. My approach is to outline the key concepts and summarise relevant case studies. For example, the case study of the US Army’s CompanyCommand community portal (Dixon, Allen, Burgess, Kilner, & Schweitzer, 2005) explains how army commanders use a CMS to support knowledge sharing, and professional discourse. Dixon et al. explain how they draw on CoP techniques (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), to guide them in facilitating social connections and conversations between CMS users. The work by Dixon et al. also seems echo the theoretical underpinnings of influential ethnographic studies by Lucy Suchman (1987), and Julian Orr (1996), which in turn, are both important influences on practice based theories.

Concepts and overlaps
Concepts and overlaps analysed, presented as a series of questions
 * 1) What is the rationale and context for the research, describing various perspectives on the social creation of knowledge and meaning?
 * 2) What are the foundation concepts in the various practice-based theories (PBTs), including communities of practice, and related work on communities and online technology?
 * 3) Is content classification a social knowledge sharing activity? In what ways can it be formal and informal? In the literature regarding online database applications (e.g. Morville, 2005), what arguments are there that formal and informal approaches to content classification should not be seen as mutually exclusive (Crawford, 2006)?
 * 4) How can we investigate the possible relevance of ideas concepts such as ‘social semantics’ (Cuel, Bouquet, & Bonifacio, 2006) and the ‘socio-semantic Web’, as proposed by Peter Morville (2005), and other socio-technical visions for the use of folksonomies and/or simple ontologies?
 * 5) Why should practice-based theories be further unpacked for application to further research?