Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis

TL;DR

The paper tackles the mismatch between synthesis needs and document-centric scholarly systems by proposing discourse graphs as a granular alternative to represent claims, evidence, and context. Through a 3-year research-through-design program, the authors implemented a Discourse Graph extension within hypertext notebooks (Roam) and deployed it with about 48 researchers, gathering rich qualitative and quantitative evidence of its intrinsic benefits for local synthesis, primary research, training, and collaboration. They demonstrate that local, incrementally formalizable discourse graphs can seed a distributed infrastructure, with sociotechnical considerations such as grammar customization and cross-platform transfer. The work argues that HCI can drive the growth of a governance-enabled, interoperable ecosystem that enhances collective intelligence and addresses infrastructure-level challenges in scholarly synthesis. Overall, the study provides concrete design patterns, empirical usage, and a roadmap for growing a discourse-centric infrastructure that links everyday research practices to scalable, networked knowledge synthesis.

Abstract

Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to the research process, both individually, and with others. These core functions are not supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: instead of the smooth functioning of functional infrastructure, researchers resort to laborious "hacks" and workarounds to "mine" publications for what they need, and struggle to efficiently share the resulting information with others. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains steadfastly document-based. Drawing from infrastructure studies, we locate the current infrastructural bottlenecks in the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. Through 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, we elaborate a design vision of what can and should be built in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: a thriving "installed base" of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. We discuss how this design vision -- and our empirical work -- contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI's capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.

Figures (27)

• Figure 1: Example discourse graph (with claims and associated context) for theories and findings on effects of bans on bad actors in online forums.
• Figure 2: Summary of design work and artifacts and research data collected across the Design and Evaluate steps of our Research through Design work.
• Figure 3: Summary of design requirements and design hypotheses developed in Design Arc (Section \ref{['sec:DesignArc']})
• Figure 4: Our Node Menu component is designed to enable incremental formalization of discourse nodes. Similar to the user experience of annotation, users select the text they want to “mark as” a discourse node, press a hotkey to initiate the node authoring action, then select the appropriate node type, either with the mouse or with the associated shortcut (1). The Discourse Graph extension then automatically creates a page with that title typed as the appropriate discourse node, and replaces the selected text with a reference to that node (2). If needed for further synthesis, users can also elaborate the nodes with more details over time, such as by migrating in screenshots of key tables and figures, into the body of a node page (3).
• Figure 5: Base discourse graph grammar that was shipped with the RoamResearch Discourse Graph extension.