MECCA - hypermedia capturing of collaborative scientific discourses about movies

The success of collaborative hypermedia systems in business, engineering, or humanities heavily depends on the discursive nature of knowledge creation. Informing systems that assist cross-disciplinary communities of practice in these fields should therefore be able to capture, to visualize, and to support the ongoing scientific discourse to keep participants informed and committed to the knowledge creation process. We present a solution for this issue, using the MECCA discourse support system for a movie research community as an example. MECCA integrates research processes with teaching processes in the humanities. Our study demonstrates that knowledge creation discourses involve a lot of re-“writing” (transcription) of discourse artifacts within or across media. We introduce an underlying formal technique to support flexible and adaptable transcription on hypermedia artifacts in the community. Our approach includes a linkage of knowledge to action which aims at seamless de-contextualization from action and recontextualization into action.