Exploring Tools for Community Engagement in Scoping and Populating a Knowledge Base
Item
Title
Exploring Tools for Community Engagement in Scoping and Populating a Knowledge Base
Abstract/Description
Many communities work to address problems that involve a variety of stakeholders with diverse knowledges, some of whom might be siloed from one another. As knowledge about a problem grows and proliferates, curating a shared knowledge base can make knowledge objects accessible and break down silos across stakeholders. In this presentation, we discuss tools for iteratively scoping and populating such a shared knowledge base, while engaging community members in the process. We will draw on specific examples from the University of Michigan’s Community Research Ecology (CoRE) project, which is building a knowledge base related to improvement research in education (IRE). Specifically, we will discuss the process of partnering with members of the IRE community to capture survey data identifying (i) how they define the IRE problem space, (ii) which knowledge objects they see as central to the problem space, and (iii) how they would begin to describe those knowledge objects with community-developed content-specific metadata. We will also discuss both a targeted search process using databases to identify knowledge objects, and also the related tools we employed for summarizing and facilitating stakeholder conversations to improve our search terms and interpret the results. These tools include topic modeling, bibliographic network analysis, and general summary metrics (such as the most frequently occurring journals and authors) to give a full view of search results for stakeholder feedback and iterative development. We will conclude both with future directions for developing and applying these tools to build community-engaged knowledge bases, as well as considerations for using them to bridge silos within a problem space. We also consider how the knowledge base development process can support engaging and capturing perspectives that may be overlooked or marginalized in a knowledge community.
Author/creator
Date
At conference
18th Biennial Conference of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA): Uprooting White Supremacy.
Institution
Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA)
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Presentation/Poster
Scholarship genre
Empirical
Methodological
IRE Approach/Concept
Open access/full-text available
No
Grant funding
Grant number
Spencer Foundation Grant #201900070
Citation
Lawlor, J. A., Lagoze, C., Huynh, M. Q., Hammond, J. W., & Moss, P. A. (2021, June 22). Exploring Tools for Community Engagement in Scoping and Populating a Knowledge Base. 18th Biennial Conference of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA): Uprooting White Supremacy. [Virtual Conference]
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