Authors:
Federico Cabitza
and
Angela Locoro
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Italy
Keyword(s):
Knowledge Artifact, Situativity, Objectivity, Natural Language Processing, Polarity Detection.
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a method by which to build a metaphorical map of a portion of the scholarly literature
along conceptual dimensions that have been previously characterized in terms of positive, negative and neutral
terms. The method allows to “locate” scholarly works in this space, according to multiple criteria, like the
definitions that they contain; the relevant concepts that can be extracted by means of a content analysis; and
relevant passages that researchers can extract in studying their content. The resulting maps are not representational,
nor trying to extract any objective essence of a scientific contribution. Rather, they are resources for the
qualitative research, review and interpretation of literature sources. As such, these maps are “knowledge artifacts”
in themselves, as they visualize, so to say, the interpretation of a set of works by qualitative researchers,
and allow to build a visual comprehension of topological and qualitative relationships between the
considered
literature contributions. We applied the method to the case of the “knowledge artifact” literature and report
the main results in this paper.
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