exegesis

Tagunity exegesis

Introduction

In this research I have sought to thresh out a better understanding of the interrelations between social knowledge sharing and the use of databases on the World Wide Web, in particular databases that enable some sort of content classification. I am particularly interested in social knowledge creation and sharing that has its basis in language and practice. Databases on the World Wide Web are increasingly and often freely available to users who may be members of community groups, called variously 'knowledge communities', communities of interest (CoI), or communities of practice (CoPs). Recent literature, including much on the topic of //social software// suggest that application such as delicious that feature 'social tagging' in fact enable community, or the creation of social networks and so called folksonomies (i.e. folks + taxonomy). Literature by members of the Semantic Web research project offers that knowledge can be represented by making explicit the ontologies or relationships between explicit terms withing a particular domain knowledge. There is very little literature on the relationship between natural language and //social// knowledge on one hand, and folksonomies or ontologies on the other.

Relationship: This section deals with the forms and materials I chose, and addresses the relevance of these particular forms and materials to the project.

Process: This section outlines the investigations I undertook to develop my ideas, whether these are document based research and/or technical experimentations. It may also involve an explanation of the effect that these investigations had on the direction of your project. - Informal literature search - Experimental use online applications that support tagging (blogs, semblogger) - Experimental use of multiple online bibliographies (e.g. Citulike; Bibsonomy) - Creation of multiple online bibliographies of literature relevant to the research - Reporting of research in a single repository (thus the Tagunity wiki)

In part, the work presented here builds upon my earlier attemps to study knowledge management, the relevance of Semantic Web technologies to business (Crosbie, check.), and a proposal to do an ethnographic evaluation of a Plone content management system used by volunteer Yarrawonga, a town in norther Victoria (Crosbie, 2004 check.). It also builds on my personal experience of organisations such as Vicnet, and various community radio stations around Melbourne.

Context: //This section identifies the aspects of contemporary culture and contemporary visual art that your project relates to and that have influenced the development of your work. When discussing particular artists who have been influential you need to identify the impact they have and on your work and comment on how your concerns and artwork differs from theirs.//

Discussion of individual works //This section links the individual works in your project to the ideas that you have expressed in the previous sections. It demonstrates how the works 'illustrate' those ideas. As your examiners will not be familiar with your work, this discussion of your work(s) and relating it/them to the other parts of the exegesis is a valuable opportunity for you to 'guide' their seeing of your work. Illustrations are useful here.//

see also exegesis_plan