An ontology-based approach to digital learning: Supporting learners’ manual web-based semantic annotation and dynamic graph-based knowledge visualisation of argumentation in multiple philosophical texts

This thesis presents a methodological and technical process for modelling and semantically annotating argumentation and intertextuality in multiple philosophical texts. This process supports novices of philosophy to analyse and comprehend argumentation in relation to specific philosophical topics. While a variety of tools and formal knowledge representation models (ontologies) already exist for supporting argumentation in a natural language text on the Web, those initiatives, to the best of my knowledge, do not capture the conceptual division between abstract propositions, abstract arguments and their expressions in texts. The thesis illustrates the benefit of enabling the formal representation of this conceptual division. It does so by enabling the semantic annotation of texts which share or refer to the same arguments and propositions and the analysis of all instances of their occurrence and of their relations with their textual expressions. To facilitate this task, the OntoSophia ontology, and the prototypical ArguNest text annotation and visualisation tool were developed. These enable learners to create annotations and access their annotations in the form of a knowledge graph. The graph supports navigation, a data-led reading of philosophical views and offers a conceptual summary of learners’ cognitive processes while analysing multiple argumentative texts. This approach is actualised with a case study, by demonstrating a representation task which aims to describe the main propositions, arguments and quoted elements of two English women philosophers, Mary Astell and Damaris Masham – critics of the philosopher John Norris – in three philosophical texts related to the topic of divine and human love in the late seventeenth century. This was a time in which Enlightenment discourse was emerging. Lastly, to evaluate the effectiveness of the framework and its suitability for its context of use with its target users, i.e. learners, novices of philosophy, an initial mixed methods user-based evaluation (quantitative and qualitative data) was conducted in January 2020 with a total of 26 undergraduate students reading for Philosophy and English at the University of Galway. The evaluation provided a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of the scaffolding method of ArguNest in supporting the annotation of multiple philosophical argumentative texts. As such this thesis offers an informed framework for future research in this interdisciplinary field.

Publisher

University of Galway

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CC BY-NC-ND

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)