Welcome to the Storymaking project. This site documents doctoral research conducted by Joanna Kwiat at the Knowledge Media Institute, under the supervision of Simon Buckingham Shum and John Domingue.
Contact: jkwiat {at sign} northamptonshire dot gov dot uk
Stories are our most primitive, and enduring, means of human communication. One reason for this may be that they are bound neither by domain nor by culture. Previous research has shown the story to be effective and appropriate for the interpretative domains and professions where empathy is important. My research is concerned with stories in and around medicine, the immediate focus being stories among medical people. People telling stories about themselves and other people, and the day-to-day things that they care about.
Storymaking, a term borrowed from Harvey and Martin (1995) refers to the construction, recall, comprehension and telling of stories. Like many others, we are interested in stories as a medium for knowledge sharing amongst practitioners (specifically in our work, amongst health professionals), and from a knowledge media perspective, we are investigating how they can be mediated in new ways via the Web.
What is the point of a story? Since stories are so powerful by virtue of the fact that their "meaning" is open-ended—very much in the eyes of the beholder—we are interested in how stories might be indexed on the Web.
What would be an appropriately flexible metadata scheme for annotating stories, which recognises the inherent ambiguity in a story's interpretation?
Can we find ways to draw on the rich history of research in narratology?
While the 'folksonomic' social tagging schemes currently in 'Web 2.0' vogue relax all constraints on how one may tag a page, they are correspondingly weak at helping a user find related pages: is there an expressive, but usable, semantics for annotating stories that can reveal more interesting connections?
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Joanna Kwiat
Simon Buckingham Shum
John Domingue
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