Supporting artifact-mediated discourses through a recursive annotation tool

This paper focuses on tight communities and specifically on the distributed, mediated discourses that their members articulate around documents and inscribed material artifacts. The paper presents a prototype-based design experience toward the definition of a collaborative annotation tool that is endowed with discourse oriented functionalities whose main characteristics have emerged from case studies we undertook in the healthcare and agricultural domains. In latter domain an initial prototype was proposed and progressively tuned to help users propose modifications to an institutional document through the expression of comments gathered around and about a common artifact, and then build a representative summary of the opinions emerging within the community as a result of this distributed discussion. In light of the reported case study, we discuss a new perspective on this class of annotating applications and the related functionalities that could realize a new simplified model of discourse and foster its adoption in distributed settings and communities of practice