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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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Encouraged Commentary

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I have a project in the works that I have had on the back burner for a while based around the idea of argument blogging - capturing the argumentative structure of interactions occurring online, particularly in blog posts and comments. In the meantime there are some similar technologies being developed elsewhere on the web. One of these technologies is encouraged commentary which uses JQuery to provide a nice interaction mechanism for dealing with comments on a blog. The basic idea is that you select the text you wish to respond to and a bubble fades into the screen next to the highlighted text offering you a button that you can click if you wish to respond. If you click the button then the highlighted text is copied into your comment and you get the opportunity to type in your response which then appears in the usual comment space near the bottom. Instructions for getting encouraged commentary working on your blog can be found over at Don't Trust This Guy. The system is nice, and automates some of the things that we have been doing to overcome the limitations of traditional comments, such as putting in the @user bit to indicate whose comment you are responding to. Another post about this new technology can be found over at readwriteweb. Whilst a good example of how to enhance the existing system by providing simple, natural, and intuitive tools to support the user I don't think that it goes far enough in supporting the kind of structural capture that we are looking for with the so-called nascent World Wide Argument Web (WWAW). I would like to be able to capture the actual argumentative structure that underpins these discussions and export the individual arguments as AIF and the dialogues as AIF+ so that they can be reused in argumentation specific tools like Araucaria. The approach I am taking is to specify dialogue games, using the Dialogue Game Description Language (DGDL), that give an appropriate range of performatives to associate with the act of commenting in blogs. We then use a similar technique to argument and dialogue capturing that we used in MAgtALO, where the argumentative relationships between statements are inferred from the types of moves that the players select in the dialogue game.

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