Sociotechnical means to sustain a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure

Develop sociotechnical means—comprising both contributor practices and authoring, sharing, and networking tools for discourse graphs that represent research claims, evidence, and their rhetorical relations—to create, sustain, and scale a discourse-centric infrastructure for scholarly synthesis; in particular, devise local systems that enhance synthesis while enabling distributed networking (e.g., peer-to-peer) and technology transfer across research contexts.

Background

The paper argues that effective research synthesis is hindered by document-centric scholarly infrastructure and advocates discourse graphs—structured representations of claims, evidence, and rhetorical relations—as a more appropriate foundation. While conceptual models (e.g., micropublications, nanopublications, SEPIO) exist, the authors note that adoption has stagnated because human and organizational capacities for sustained contribution and sharing are lacking.

Mapping infrastructure studies to their setting, the authors identify the bottleneck not as a missing data model but as the absence of sociotechnical mechanisms—people, practices, incentives, and tools—for authoring discourse graphs locally, networking them across contexts, and transferring the approach between tools and communities. They frame this as the remaining open HCI problem for growing a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure.

References

This formulation of the remaining open problem aligns with researchers' diagnosis of the current main blocker to progress towards a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: the lack of sociotechnical means --- such as people to do the work of creating discourse graphs, and tools for them to do this work --- for creating and sustaining this infrastructure.

— Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis (2407.20666 - Chan et al., 2024) in Section 1: Introduction