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Tech Report kmi-97-12 Abstract


Negotiating the Construction and Reconstruction of Organisational Memories
Techreport ID: kmi-97-12
Date: 1997
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum
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This paper describes an approach to capturing organisational memory, which serves to ground an analysis of human issues that knowledge management (KM) technologies raise. In the approach presented, teams construct graphical webs of the arguments and documents relating to key issues they are facing. This supports collaborative processes which are central to knowledge work, and provides a group memory of this intellectual investment. This approach emphasises the centrality of negotiation in making interdisciplinary decisions in a changing environment. Discussion in the paper focuses on key human dimensions to KM technologies, including the cognitive and group dynamics set up by an approach, the general problem of preserving contextual cues, and the political dimensions to formalising knowledge processes and products. These analyses strongly motivate the adoption of participatory design processes for KM systems.

Publication(s):

Journal of Universal Computer Science (Special Issue on IT for Knowledge Management), 3 (8), 1997, Springer-Verlag. (To be reprinted in: Borghoff, U.M. and Pareschi, R., (Eds.), Information Technology for Knowledge Management. Springer-Verlag, 1998)
 
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Narrative Hypermedia is...


Narrative Hypermedia
Narrative is concerned fundamentally with coherence, for instance, whether that be a fiction, an historical account or an argument, none of which 'make sense' unless they are put together in a coherent manner.

Hypermedia is the combination of hypertext for linking and structuring multimedia information.

Narrative Hypermedia is therefore concerned with how all of the above narrative forms, plus the many other diverse forms of discourse possible on the Web, can be effectively designed to communicate coherent conceptual structures, drawing inspiration from theories in narratology, semiotics, psycholinguistics and film.